Last Chance Llama Ranch

by Hilary Fields

  Scenery like this.

  Merry came to a halt at an outcropping of lichen-speckled granite. The Germans had gone on a ways, moving from one viewpoint to another to snap photos and exclaim over each new sight. Sam was helping them get a picture together at a likely looking rock ledge. But Merry was mesmerized right where she stood.

  The world dropped away beneath her boots; the topsides of clouds were hers to explore. Wind—much colder up here than at the base of the trail—whipped about her and tried to tease her hair out of its braid. It stole moisture from her eyes, blurring her vision, but Merry blinked fiercely. She wanted to see this. In the distance, the sharp daggerlike edges of the smaller peaks in the Sangre de Cristo chain were blunted with a blanket of snow. The nearby slopes were a jumbled moonscape of barren stone challenged by hardy green tundra grasses, while the valleys, forests, and farmland of the surrounding area stretched out to the horizon like a banquet.

  Her banquet.

  “Fuck,” she said softly.

  And she started to cry.

  Merry was not a dainty weeper. But now, standing at the summit of Wheeler Peak, was not the time for ladylike sniffles. Fortunately, she had a very absorbent friend. Severus stood stoutly at her flank, shoring up her weaker left side as she buried her face in his crusty wool and bawled.

  “Jesus—Merry, are you alright?” A hand touched her back, and Merry jumped, spinning around and stumbling away from Sam. She knuckled her eyes, grateful once again that llamas were hypoallergenic.

  “Give me a minute, would you?” she mumbled.

  Understanding lit in Sam’s eyes, and his gaze softened. “I had a similar reaction the first time I came up here.” He fumbled in the pocket of his overalls and fished out a threadbare old bandana. “Here,” he said almost shyly, proffering the cloth. “Catch up when you’re ready. I’ll get Karl and Birgit settled with some snacks meanwhile.”

  “I should help—” Merry started, even as she accepted the hankie.

  Sam’s hand curled over hers, patting. “Stay. It’s just brownies and coffee. I can manage.”

  If he’d said one more kind word, Merry thought she might have dissolved into a puddle. Fortunately, Sam Cassidy had a rather limited stock of compassion. “Don’t worry, Wookiee,” he added. “I’ll save you a brownie. Big girl like you needs to keep up your strength.”

  And he padded away on silent bare feet, leaving Merry unsure which she wanted more—to shove him over the cliff, or thank him profusely. Because, whether he knew it or not, Surly Sam had just given her back a piece of herself Merry had thought was lost forever.

  True, things would never be the way they’d been BT (Before Tree). She’d never carve virgin powder at eighty miles an hour, or leave her competition spitting snow while she sliced the ribbon at the finish line. But she’d made it to the top of the tallest mountain in New Mexico under her own steam, damn it, and that was more than she’d ever expected to do again. (Well, Snape had helped.) Maybe she’d never own the slopes. Maybe she’d never stand atop a podium and listen while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played and gold was placed around her neck.

  But I’m alive. I’m here. And I’m grateful.

  “Let’s go get some brownies, Snape,” she said. “I think we’ve earned it.”

  Hey, Lady Hobbit. How was the trail?” Needlepoint Bob, sitting on a stool behind the host station, greeted Merry with a wide smile. In his surprisingly elegant hands, he held a canvas-stretched hoop and a needle dangling colored thread.

  Merry didn’t have time to check out the design he was creating, or even answer his question. Other matters were more pressing.

  “Washroom. Stat.” The words came out as a croak.

  Bob chuckled, pointed down the hall with the hand holding the needle. “Help yourself.”

  At the communal trough that served as a sink outside the toilets, Merry washed. And scrubbed. Scrubbed again. But there was only so much she could rinse away of this day. Gunk, yes, until the water ran gray down the drain. Emotional hangover? Not so much. She was still quivering from the intensity of the moment when she’d stood atop that mountain, feeling all the loss she’d spent the last two years trying to bury, run from, and ignore. Reeling with the knowledge that it was time to let go and move on.

  And speaking of quivering…every muscle in her body was quaking like Jell-O. She stood clutching the lip of the sink, breathing hard, sweat popping on her brow as her legs threatened to give way underneath her. We’re the Millennium Falcon, remember? she told her bad leg. You. Will. Hold. Together. She scrabbled in her satchel for her Advil. Percocet—or perhaps a keg full of Fentanyl—would have helped more, but Merry had broken with such medications the minute she’d been released from the hospital, determined not to descend into a habit that would take her even further down the rabbit hole than she’d already fallen. The last of my self-preservation instinct, I guess, she thought, running a brush through her hair and rebraiding it, then washing her hands once more after touching her dusty locks. She couldn’t help acknowledging that Sam had actually done a better job of tidying her recalcitrant mane, though wind, llama love bites, and tree branches had since made a mockery of his ungentle ministrations.

  Whereas his lips had made a mockery of her sangfroid.

  For good measure, she gargled and spat before heading back into the dining area.

  Taking the same booth she’d occupied the night before, Merry fetched out her cell phone and, seeing it had died the long, slow death of roaming disease, plugged it into the outlet she was happy to discover under her table. Definitely gonna make this my regular booth. She eased her laptop out of her bag and fired it up, plugging that in too. She figured she had just enough stamina to update her column before she lapsed into a catatonic state and Bob was forced to peel her out of the seat with a spatula to send her back to the ranch. She decided checking her email and reading the comments from yesterday’s post could wait—right now it was more important to get the new stuff down while it was still fresh in her mind.

  Her fingers—practically the only part of her that didn’t ache—flew across the keys, and the rest of the world disappeared.

  * * *

  …Back at the truck, we thanked our beasts of burden with a hearty helping of grain. (I fed Severus out of the hat he’d formed such an attachment to, figuring that would be the best of both worlds for him.) Karl and Birgit departed with many enthusiastic words of praise, a handsome tip for each of us (I gave mine to Sam as I’m really just a freeloader), and promises of positive reviews on TripAdvisor. As for my own review? Yes, emphatically, you should try it. Live a little. Llama lot.

  ’Til next time, I’ll be…

  On My Merry Way.

  * * *

  Merry scanned her last paragraph, nodded with satisfaction, and hit “Enter” to send the article out into the world. She found herself smiling, her memories of the day’s outing the rosier for the retelling. I’m happy, she thought, more than a little surprised. Actually pretty happy! Then she uncrossed her legs and tried to recross them in the other direction.

  Lightning shot up her left leg, and she bit her lip to keep the bolt from shooting out of her mouth. The diner was nearly deserted at this hour of the afternoon, but the few folk who sat nursing cups of coffee or toying with slices of pie probably wouldn’t appreciate a banshee wailing in their midst.

  “I hate Germans,” Merry groaned.

  Bob, setting a steaming cup down in front of Merry, raised a brow as he settled his comfortable bulk opposite her, needlework at his side. “I’ll admit some of their philosophical texts are a bit dense, and World War Two wasn’t exactly their finest hour, but what brings this particular distaste on today?”

  Merry’s lips twitched as she saw the cup’s contents—he’d etched a fair rendition of The Scream into the foam of her latte. “I should qualify that…I’ve known any number of Germans I liked quite a lot. I lived for months at a time in the Alps while I was in training, and my hosts were never anything
but gracious. It’s just these particular Germans today I resent.”

  Bob waited.

  “Hansel and Gretel basically lapped me all the way up Wheeler Peak and back. They had to be about a hundred and sixty between the two of them, but those oldies could hoof it.” Cautiously, she stretched her legs out, wincing as she rubbed the left one. “Even the llamas were winded before the end.”

  “It’s true, Germans are the hardiest hikers. They come in here all the time, asking if we have any hard trails.”

  “From what I saw, they’re all hard.”

  Bob smiled. “All a matter of what you’re conditioned for, I guess.”

  “You hike?”

  “Do I look like I hike?” He jiggled his Santa-style paunch, enrobed in a tee shirt that had once been black. Some wag had dyed the words I Like Bleach—in what was obviously bleach—across the front.

  “I bet you hold your own,” Merry said. Bob probably floated to the top of the local mountains on a magic carpet. She wouldn’t be surprised if people flocked to him for wisdom once he got there. Merry sipped her latte, let out a moan of appreciation. If anything, it was even tastier than last night’s. “Anyway, you’d think those two were reenacting the Teutonic invasion of Poland, the way they hustled. We were done an hour earlier than Sam usually finishes, he said.”

  “I saw him drop you off out front,” Bob said.

  You mean when he flung open the truck door and practically rolled me out while it was still moving? Merry grimaced. Sam hadn’t said much after he’d handed her the hankie, though whether he was giving her space or disgusted by her display of emotion she couldn’t say. Or maybe it was just lingering awkwardness from their accidental lip-whack. (She refused to call it a kiss.) In any case, he’d saved his conversation for the Muellers on the way down to the trailhead, and after they’d departed with many danke, auf wiedersehens! he’d said nothing, merely giving her a ride to town on his way back to the ranch. Merry had been grateful for the silence. She’d needed the time to process the shift that had taken place within her.

  “Yeah, he told me he could finish up without me. I had a lot of work to do for the magazine, and I really can’t put it off or my readers will get impatient.”

  Bob grunted understanding. “Speaking of which, I think your column is already having an effect on the local economy. Callie over at the motel told me she’d gotten a couple bookings through the Internet. Flustered her so much, I had to show her how to process them. And I actually had a call this morning asking if we took reservations.” He grinned. “I think you’re putting Aguas Milagros on the map.”

  Merry was absurdly pleased to hear it. At least I’m doing something right. “I hope that’s cool with you,” she said. “It can be a bit weird for small-business owners when they suddenly get noticed.”

  “Weird,” said Bob, “is right in my comfort zone. And I don’t think I’m in much danger of becoming overrun by—what’s that you call them? Hipsters? Though come to think of it, it might be nice to talk Nietzsche with the younger set.”

  Merry smiled. “I’ll have a muse-off with you one of these nights, Bob. Though I’m a bit rusty on my nihilist philosophers these days. I was always more partial to the French existentialists.”

  “Good deal.” He swiped his needlework off the table and rose to his feet. “I don’t want to keep you from your adoring public. Can I get you something to eat before I take my leave, Lady Hobbit?” Bob asked. “’Licia was going to shut down the kitchen for a few hours and catch a siesta but I think she’s still back there.”

  “Oh, no thanks. I’m still stuffed on Dolly’s picnic lunch.” Besides, her body was wound so tight with pain she actually felt nauseated.

  “Dolly’s cooking is one of the finer pleasures of life,” Bob acknowledged, “or so I recall from the days I was still welcome at her table.” He put on what she was beginning to think of as his notable-quotable voice. “‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.’”

  “Martha Stewart?” Merry hazarded.

  “J. R. R. Tolkien. I’d have thought you’d know that one,” Bob teased.

  “I’m not at the top of my game just now.” Merry sighed, scrubbing her hands down her face. “And I’ve still got a lot of correspondence to catch up on. Hopefully I can finish before my forehead makes forcible contact with my keyboard.”

  “Well, if you’re full up with food but still out of gas, how about a shot of whiskey in your coffee?” Bob was looking at her with an all-too-perceptive expression, and more sympathy in his eyes than Merry could handle right now without breaking down.

  A shot of whiskey would certainly jumpstart her coma, but Merry needed her wits about her for a while yet—after she finished here, she still had to check back with Dolly and see if her hostess had any final chores for her to do this evening. “Another time, and thanks.”

  “I’ll leave you to it then.” Bob picked up his needlework—which looked to be a bust of Homer—and went back to his post up front.

  * * *

  No sense putting off the inevitable. It was time to find out if she still had a job.

  Merry opened a Skype window and dialed up her boss.

  It was Sunday at three p.m. his time, so naturally Joel picked up halfway through the first electronic bleep. His face was unshaven, hair flattened on one side, and he appeared to be wearing his wife’s (or possibly his mother’s) pink-and-yellow flowered bathrobe, but his eyes were as alert as ever.

  “Kid! What’s the news from lla-lla land?” (Merry knew he’d thrown the pun in there because of the way he stretched out the l’s, and because she knew Joel couldn’t resist a good pun. Or a bad pun. Or, really, any pun at all.

  “Hey, Joel, got time to talk? I hope I’m not dragging you away from anything.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just catching up on Call of Duty.” Behind him, Merry could see what had to be at least sixty acres of flat-screen television. The image frozen on it was a cartoonishly muscled supersoldier blasting something that looked like a glowing-eyed ghost with a weapon hardly smaller than himself. “What’s the haps out west?” Joel leaned into the screen, giving Merry a magnified view of his stubbly cheeks as he peered more closely into the webcam, as if that would bridge the distance between them. “You look tired, kid. The farm folk treating you alright?”

  Merry glanced around, but there was no one to overhear her except Bob, and he seemed completely engrossed in his stitchery. But it shouldn’t matter; she really had nothing negative to say about her time in Aguas Milagros so far. “Oh, for sure,” she told her boss. “It’s amazing here. The animals, the scenery, the people…you can’t believe it. I only hope I’m doing a good job capturing it for the column.” Merry was fishing for compliments, but she didn’t care.

  “Have you seen your comments, kiddo?”

  “No, I haven’t had time to look yet.”

  “Well, look. I’ll wait.” Bob had already turned back to his video game, and the sound of machine-gun fire came faintly to Merry’s ears from his living room. Merry switched browser windows to check out her column from yesterday, which was hosted on her own dedicated page on Pulse. A surprisingly strong feeling of pride hit her when she saw her first DDWID entries from “lla-lla land” in black and white, etched into the Internet forevermore. She scrolled down to the bottom.

  Her eyes widened. There were four hundred and eighty-seven comments on her column. Her eyes scanned the most recent.

  Blattypus: Holy, shizzle, Miz Merry…u weren’t foolin’ about the fluffsters! I died myself 4 or 5 times when I saw the pictures u posted.

  KittyCamaro: I can haz foof?

  TravelBiatch: Did you snog Major Gorgeous yet? We want Sam pics!

  GrlyGrl: Srsly…I want a slice of Studly Sam.

  MissPoppins: Dearest Merry, I wouldn’t do what you did, but I love DDWID! Keep it up. I think I speak for everyone when I say, well done. We all love your new feature.

  LeisureLarry:
Don’t speak for all of us. It’s rude.

  WhyKiki: Shut up, Larry.

  GopherButt: This comment has been hidden for unhelpful content.

  User46376: Is you’re hair frizzy? Click here to recieve a free sampel of our miricle serum!

  Merry sat back, stunned. She switched back to her Skype window. “Jesus, Joel. I’ve never had nearly this many responses before.”

  Joel hit “Pause” on his game and rose from his sofa to turn back to his laptop. His bathrobe gaped open for a second as he seated himself at what she figured must be his kitchen table, and Merry flinched. I did not see anything. I most fervently did not just see my boss’s junk. “Did you run the analytics yet?”

  “No—I’m sorry.” Merry hung her head. How many times had Joel told her to check her stats first thing? “I literally just got back from escorting a couple of llama-loving tourists up a mountain, like, ten minutes ago.”

  Joel waved magnanimously. “No worries, kiddo. I ran ’em this morning. You’re up eighty percent this column over last.”

  “What?”

  “People are eating this ‘Don’t Do What I Did’ shit up with the proverbial spoon, kid. Told ya they would.”

  “Wow.” Merry sipped her latte, melting the last of the teeny scream into nothingness. “That’s amazing, Joel. Are the corporate overlords happy?”

  “Happier than a hedge fund manager screwing a subprime mortgage holder out of his life savings.”

  “That’s pretty happy.”

  “You got that right.”

  “I was worried it wasn’t ‘Don’t Do’ enough,” Merry confessed. “I didn’t know if you were expecting me to make everything sound like a disaster all the time, or what.”