The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  It was all pleasure except for one thing. He was having the hardest time trying to keep the blocky toes of those hiking books in the stirrups. If I live through this, Clay thought, I’ll get me a new pair of cowboy boots in the morning!

  Rock formations started to show up, then cliffs and domes and spires of rock with the tall trees growing in niches, and the chase was dropping through sandstone formations now and into the beginnings of a canyon.

  He caught up with Sarah, who’d slowed to a walk. At last they could hold up and rest. The wild horses couldn’t get up the sides of the canyon unless they could fly.

  “Is this it?” Clay asked, all winded. “Death Hollow?” Now Curly caught up, panting and proud.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “They could work their way back up to the lake from here. I know a way into Death Hollow a few miles down. That’s where we’ll take them.”

  And that’s what Sarah did. She knew a place where only two horses at a time could squeeze between the rocks, and she and her dogs funneled them through the crack, all eighteen of them, and into Death Hollow. Clay helped her drag logs and brush until they’d plugged the gap behind them.

  Through a world of bizarre rock formations they rode into the afternoon. They drove the horses into the bottom of Death Hollow where sufficient grass and a flowing creek would provide a sanctuary. Sarah flanked them, pushing them back upstream a ways, and then she said, “Let’s go fix the fence.”

  Clay took a last glimpse at the horses and started down the canyon. They soon came upon an old homestead by the creek, long abandoned. Where the canyon walls narrowed to a gap a half-mile farther, they stopped to repair the high pole fence that was down in two places. “Your uncle sure put a lot of work into this,” Sarah said as they lifted the first pole into position.

  It didn’t take long to put the fence back to rights. “Those horses aren’t getting out this way,” Clay commented as they stood back to admire the fence, intact once again. He lifted his hat and wiped his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “They’ll be waiting right here for Uncle Clay. On to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance!”

  As they rode into the ranch, they felt like they were still ten thousand feet up. It was a good feeling, exchanging glances as they approached the house, having a secret between them.

  Her mother was working at the sink. She was wearing rubber gloves and lifting jars of bright red tomatoes out of a steaming enamel pot. The radio was on; she’d been listening as she worked. Her apron showed she’d been through something. “How was it?” she asked Sarah brightly. Suddenly aware of his hat, Clay doffed it and held it by his side. “How was the fishing?” her mother asked.

  “We forgot all about it!” Sarah replied.

  Clay added, “It sure is beautiful up there, Mrs. Darling.”

  “I’m glad you liked it, Clay. It doesn’t seem like the fishing’s ever that good late in the summer anyway. Sarah, I haven’t heard a peep out of Libby and Nora, and you know that’s not a good sign. Would you check on them? We have to keep moving if we’re going to get you to the movies on time. Your dad’s got the charcoal going. We’re just going to have some hamburgers and potato salad. They were up in their room getting ready for the fair.”

  “County fair starts this weekend,” Sarah explained. “It starts the day after tomorrow, actually tomorrow night with the dance out at Dance Hall Rock.”

  “We hope you’ll be staying through the fair, Clay. Have you ever been to a county fair?”

  “No, Ma’am, but I’d sure like to. I guess they have them out there. But not where we live. I’m pretty much of a city kid, I guess. Well, not really a city kid—I guess I’m a kid from the suburbs.”

  “After the summer you’ve had I’d say you’d pass for a cowboy.”

  Clay smiled. “I feel like I’m from out here. They say in the Northwest, you can tell the natives because they have moss growing on their north side, but I feel like all mine must’ve burned off by now.”

  He followed Sarah into the living room. They heard something, and then they listened again. They glanced at each other. Could it be? Yes it was. The unmistakable sound of small hoofs galloping.

  “Uh-oh,” Sarah said, and went flying upstairs.

  She disappeared. Still more galloping.

  Clay hesitated, then climbed the stairs. He’d better catch that rascal before he broke something of the Darlings’.

  At the top of the landing he saw Burrito streak from one room into another with the girls on his heels. What in the world? Did he see what he thought he’d seen?

  Clay poked his head in the doorway.

  Yes indeed. Burrito was dressed to kill in a blue vest and matching blue bonnet that fit down over his ears. The baby burro was standing in the middle of a large bed, on a fancy lace bedspread, snorting loudly and all cocked for mischief. With a glance Clay realized this was the parents’ bedroom. Porcelain knickknacks on low nightstands were poised delicately just waiting to crash.

  “You guys …” Sarah was saying ominously. She was on one side of the bed, her sisters on the other.

  “We’ve got him surrounded,” Libby said.

  That’s when Burrito bolted, and Clay tried to grab for him. The burro galloped as if to one side, then swerved and shot right between his legs.

  “Get him!” the girls were yelling, and little Nora was shrieking for joy as she and her flying pigtails chased the burro down the hallway.

  “What’s going on up there?” their mother was calling. “You girls should be getting ready for supper and the movies.”

  “Nothing, Mom,” Libby called back. “We’re getting ready.”

  Past a brightly colored room with two beds, Burrito raced into the one at the end of the hall. When they caught up with him Burrito was standing in a white wicker rocking chair and bracing himself against its motion. His ears swiveled around one at a time and pointed at them, and he snorted explosively.

  “I’ve heard of a rocking horse before,” Libby said, “but never a rocking burro.”

  “And look what he’s standing on,” Sarah said less than enthusiastically.

  Nora put her little hand over her mouth. “Your dress, Sarah! Your dress for the dance!”

  “I’ll get him,” Libby said confidently, edging closer.

  And she did. When Burrito leaped from the rocker, Libby caught him in midair. Suddenly the burro was still, but he was breathing heavily. “You little devil,” Libby said affectionately, and kissed him on the nose.

  Sarah was arranging her dress over the top of the rocker. It was a beautiful rose color, with a neckline of embroidered flowers and the bottom circled with layers of pink and white ruffles.

  “Sarah made it herself,” Nora explained importantly. “Especially for the dance. This is Sarah’s room.”

  Clay could already tell that. There was one entire shelf dedicated to figurines of horses. There must have been two dozen of them.

  “Burrito’s outfit is awful cute,” Sarah said, and her sisters beamed. Clay scratched the inside of one of the burro’s ears and explained to Libby, “He likes that.”

  “We’re entering him in the county fair!” exclaimed Nora. “In the pets division!”

  “If he wins a blue ribbon, it won’t be for Best Behaved,” Sarah replied.

  Her sisters left to see if it might still be possible to sneak Burrito out of the house. Clay was looking around the room.

  “It’s a mess,” Sarah said, blushing.

  “No, it’s not, it’s just the opposite. You should see my room if you want to see a mess. I like your dress. You really made it all by yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  It seemed amazing to be in her room. Right where she lives. In the heart of where she lives. His eyes were drawn to a bulletin board about half covered with blue ribbons, and under it photos of her at all different ages with ponies and big horses too. “You won all these ribbons?” he said, as he looked closely at her as a little girl.

  “Don’t look at those,�
�� she said. “I look terrible.”

  “You look … wonderful.”

  Beside the first, a second bulletin board was covered with photos clipped from movie magazines, of different movie stars and one of Monument Valley!

  She wasn’t speaking, she seemed bashful and uncertain. Clay’s eyes were drawn back to the figurines of horses, some crystal, some porcelain, some wood. “They’re beautiful,” he said.

  The shelf above was full of books. “Misty of Chincoteague,” he said aloud. “Hey, I remember that book. It’s about wild horses! How the Spanish conquistadores first brought them over, and they got away and went wild!”

  Clay scanned the titles. “All these books are about horses!” It came to him, something he could do for her when he got back home. He had a wood-carving set he’d gotten for Christmas and never used once. If he could learn to carve well enough to send her a carving that he had made with his own hands, she would keep the horse he’d made right here along with the others.

  20

  Clay and Sarah were whispering when the lights went down, the big screen lit up, and the music began. They whispered through the opening credits when those words appeared across the screen, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “Who do you think shot him?” Clay whispered. “Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne?”

  “Shhhhh!” came Libby’s voice amid her giggles, from right behind them. Little Nora chimed in, “They’re on a date! They’re on a date!”

  Clay glanced from the screen, where Jimmy Stewart was stepping off the train, to Sarah’s face. Her eyebrows were saying, “My sisters are pests, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  He didn’t mind. He’d enjoyed treating them to popcorn and soda. He was thinking of them more as pets than pests.

  Back to the screen. He didn’t want to miss a bit of it. What matter that her sisters were giggling behind them? It was dark, it was a movie house, and here was John Wayne bigger than life. This really was all happening to him, all in the town of Escalante, Utah, on a day he’d run wild horses out of the mountains with the girl sitting right beside him, a girl made of the stuff of his own heart.

  Liberty Valance swaggered onto the screen, leering and vile, and his whip hand knocked Jimmy Stewart to the ground. “He’s awful,” Sarah whispered. “He’s scum,” Clay whispered back.

  “Is he going to kiss her?” Nora asked Libby. Then the two were giggling again.

  Clay pretended he didn’t hear that. The movie heated up. The girls were all caught up in it now too.

  When the big moment in the movie came and Clay realized the sacrifice John Wayne was making, that he would give up the girl he loved to Jimmy Stewart, that he would let her and everyone believe that it was the tenderfoot with the law books who had shot Liberty Valance, Clay couldn’t keep the tears from his eyes and his hand from reaching for Sarah’s. The girls were too absorbed to notice and he watched the last minutes of the movie with her hand in his. He felt her gentle grip as the joy and the sadness of the day and the movie ran back and forth between them.

  The music swelled and the lights went up, and Clay was blinking away the tears. John Wayne had lived out his life and gone to his grave lonely. Clay felt sure there was nothing as miraculous in life as love. “Great movie,” he said.

  Sarah squeezed his hand and then their hands parted. Sarah’s eyes were misty too. The girls were giggling again. People were standing up and stretching, and moving up the aisles.

  “That’s him,” Sarah said suddenly. “Staring at us. That’s Barlow, in the vest.”

  Clay saw the man there, across the aisle and down to the right, still seated and staring at him. Yes, at him.

  Why?

  Now the big man raised himself slowly, fitted his hat to his head, staring all the while. Clay could feel the fear coming from the little girls—the man sent a chill through him too.

  Barlow lumbered up the aisle, but as he reached their row, he stopped. They were only a few seats in and Barlow was leaning toward them. His face was hard like an anvil, and his eyes squinted with hatred.

  “So you’re the kid,” Barlow said hoarsely. “I heard you were staying with the Darlings.”

  His voice made everything sound like swearing.

  “So you’re the big ex-rodeo star’s nephew.”

  “That’s right,” Clay managed. It felt like there was no air in his lungs to talk with. I’m not going to let him bully me, he thought. “—And proud of it,” he added in a louder voice.

  Libby and Nora were frozen to their seats. Sarah was tensed and waiting.

  The man brought his face closer, and his voice began to rasp even before he spoke. “I bet you think this is all a game, don’t you kid? Your uncle stealing my horses, resting up a few days in jail. Just like in the movies, right? We’ll see what you think in a few days.”

  Now Barlow stared at Sarah as well, and then back at Clay. “I’m not surprised you’re staying with the Darlings. Well, her father and his brother Sheriff Darling are going to find that things aren’t going to turn out quite the way they thought. I’m putting a stop to all this, once and for all.”

  With that he was gone. The big man strode up the aisle and disappeared.

  “Isn’t he awful,” Libby said. “He thinks he’s so big.”

  “He was worse than Liberty Valance,” Nora declared.

  Clay looked around. Barlow was gone. Everyone had left the theater but them.

  Sarah hadn’t spoken but now she did. “Horsekiller,” she said between her teeth.

  “I wonder what John Wayne would do to him,” Libby said. “He’d take care of him.”

  Clay looked at Sarah. She was just as shaken as he was. “Sarah, what did he mean? What’s he going to do?”

  Deeply troubled, Clay said good night to the Darlings and collected Curly, then walked over to the bunkhouse in the bright moonlight. He’d sit awhile out on the porch, where he could think. What did Barlow mean? What did he know?

  It wasn’t but a few minutes until he saw Mr. Darling coming his way. He took a seat on the porch next to Clay.

  Clay wondered if Mr. Darling had come over to talk about Barlow. Sarah had told her father all about what happened at the movies, that Barlow had made some kind of bad threat about Uncle Clay. But her father had said little about it, remaining strangely silent.

  “We used to have a fair number of mountain lions around here,” the rancher began slowly, as if he were talking to the night.

  “Once in a while a lion would take a few calves, not many. Now the lions are about gone. We’re making the world safe for cows, I guess … When I was a kid, younger than you are now, I saw the last wolf in these parts.”

  “You saw a wolf, around here?”

  “Lobo Arch is named after him, down in Coyote Canyon. That wolf was likely the last survivor of a pack in the Arizona Strip, and must’ve swum the Colorado over to the Escalante side.”

  The man’s voice trailed away, as he seemed to have drifted out of the present. But then he picked up his story as he reached for a pine needle on the railing that he stuck in his teeth like a straw. “That wolf had a habit of nosing through piles of tin cans and garbage out around the line shacks. Finally he put his foot in a trap hidden in one of those piles. He dragged that trap ten miles before he was finally shot.”

  “You were there?”

  “Got there right after he was killed. That wolf was the most bedraggled canine I’ve seen in my life. Last wolf. It was my father that shot him. And you know, after that he wouldn’t even shoot a coyote. Never talked about it, but I could tell killing that wolf had changed him, and I guess it did me too.”

  Clay didn’t know what to say, and wasn’t sure why Mr. Darling was telling him these things.

  “Clay, we’re sure pleased you’ll be here to take in the county fair with us. It starts with the dance tomorrow evening out at Dance Hall Rock—it’s to commemorate the dances that the pioneers held there back in 1879. They were on their way to Hole-in-the-Rock, to cross the C
olorado and start a mission up the San Juan. Anyway, I wanted to ask if you’d help me with the chuck wagon tomorrow afternoon. We’ll go out there in the old style and get the barbecue started with some other fellows, and Mrs. Darling and the girls will drive out a little later with the side dishes and all. Would you do that with me?”

  Clay didn’t understand why Sarah’s father was being so formal. “Sure,” Clay said. “Happy to.”

  Mr. Darling didn’t say anything for a while, then at last he said, “After that meeting we were at this evening, I had a chance to visit with my brother, the sheriff. I don’t know how else to tell you this, but you deserve to know, so I’m just going to have to come out and say it. There’s some news about your uncle that isn’t so good.”

  How bad? Clay thought. How bad?

  “Barlow has some connections in Salt Lake. He’s succeeded in having another court hear your uncle’s case rather than ours here, on the grounds that this is a small town and everyone’s too worked up on one side or the other. What that means is, your uncle’s going to be moved way up to Salt Lake.”

  “How soon?” Clay asked desperately.

  “Day after tomorrow … I know you’re disappointed, but I’m glad you got to visit him—”

  “Can I see him in the morning?”

  “I’d sure think so. My brother’s disappointed that it’s worked out like this…. Maybe your mom, as soon as she gets back, can find the best lawyer possible for him.”

  “How bad is it? How much trouble is he in?”

  Mr. Darling looked away, and thought awhile, and then he looked back. “No telling yet, but it doesn’t look good. There’s a chance he’ll have to serve time in the state prison. Make an example out of him, that kind of thing. To tell you the truth, I wish he’d managed to get away last week when they first caught him. If he could have made it back onto the reservation and across the Arizona border … This sort of offense they wouldn’t bother to extradite a man for. Likely wouldn’t be any more trouble if he just stayed out of the state.”