Derek narrowed his eyes with suspicion. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“Wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You blew right through the guts and now you think the meat is tainted.”
“No. Not at all. Right into the heart.”
“Well, what’s wrong with it, then?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
Aiden swung down from his stallion’s saddle. Derek held his cigarette between his lips and opened his truck door, stepping into the dirt.
They stood over the body of the buck where it lay lashed to the drag sled, head lolling.
“Why don’t you want it, then?”
“I can’t say exactly. I just don’t.”
“You didn’t field-dress it.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you field-dress it? Not like you not to.”
“I just didn’t want to, that’s all.”
“And why d’you want to give it away now?”
“I told you. I just don’t want it.”
Derek pushed his hat back on his head, revealing half of his sweat-slicked hair. “Why shoot it in the first place if you don’t want it?”
“I guess I thought I wanted it then,” Aiden said.
“Livie’s gonna kill you if she finds out you shot it but she won’t be eating any of it.”
“I expect.”
They stood in silence for a time. Long enough that Aiden felt he could watch the twilight darken. But that might only have been his imagination.
“I think you’ve gone and lost what little bit was left of your mind,” Derek said at last. “But if you’re crazy enough to give away this much meat, I’m smart enough to take it. Come on. Help me get it on my truck.”
Aiden stood in line at the local market, three people in front of him but no one behind. That was what happened when you got a slow start into town after the working day.
In his cart was a frozen lasagna, a bottle of wine that was for Livie and not for himself, and a bag of navel oranges.
He looked up at the ceiling fans as he waited. He did not think about anything. There was nothing safe to think about.
The checker was a woman he had not seen before. In these parts, new people did not happen along every day. Oh, maybe standing beside their cars at a filling station, they did. But not so much working at the local businesses.
She had long dark hair, pinned up on her head. Eyes so dark they were almost black. She was not the image of fashion model slimness like Livie. Neither was she particularly big. Just full. Round where women have curves.
Then Aiden questioned what he was doing looking at her curves, and the line shifted forward by one shopper.
Her name tag said “Gwen.”
When he finally got up to Gwen to have his scant groceries scanned, she lifted her eyes to his and smiled. That in itself was nothing much. Warner’s Market probably encouraged such behavior. But the smile itself was a deeper moment. Not intimate, but as though she actually saw him. That startled Aiden, and made him take a figurative step backward to protect his delicate insides.
Insides that he had thought to be quite sturdy until just a little earlier that day.
“Dinner?” she asked, nodding at his lasagna. Probably just to have something to say.
“Looks that way.” He opened his wallet and pulled out two twenties. Then, to fill an awkward vacuum of words, he added, “You’re new here.”
“I am.”
“Just got to town?”
“About a week ago, but this is only my third day on the job.”
Meanwhile, as they tried to conduct this simple conversation, there was the issue of the dog breaking through to Aiden’s conscious mind.
Someone had tied a dog to a newspaper vending box out in front of the market, and the doors were open to take in the evening cool. This was not a supermarket with automatic doors. Aiden would have had to drive more than forty miles into Bakersfield to find one of those, and what would have been the point of doing so? This local market was just a little storefront business letting out onto the pedestrian sidewalk, on which a shopper had tied his or her dog. It was an animal Aiden had not seen around these parts before.
The dog was whining.
Aiden had been aware of his own discomfort, but only in that moment did the cause of the stress become conscious. It escalated the sensation, to know. It felt like someone had tightened a vise clamp on his large intestines.
“Welcome, anyway,” Aiden said, realizing he had left his end of the conversation alone too long.
“You okay?” Gwen asked, lifting her eyes to him again in that manner that made him feel bare.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. It did not sound convincing. He looked around to see if another shopper was waiting in line behind him wishing he would hurry things along. There was no one there. “Just . . . ,” he began. Then he stalled briefly. “That dog was just bothering me.”
“Aw,” she said, as if to dismiss his statement, “he’s just lonely. Not even being that loud.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean the dog shouldn’t be whining. Or that he was bothering me with his . . . I just meant . . . oh, hell, what did I mean? He just sounds so uncomfortable. I was feeling for his situation. It was making me uncomfortable, too.”
“Well, aren’t you sweet?” Gwen said, her voice rising into a distinctly feminine range that made Aiden’s heart hurt.
Aiden sensed movement and looked around to see Trey, his other ranch hand, step into line behind him with a six-pack.
Meanwhile Gwen was still speaking in that voice.
“You just know he’ll feel all better when his person gets back to him.”
“He doesn’t know that, though,” Aiden said. He didn’t want to say it with Trey listening, but he did anyway. “He thinks it might be forever this time.”
He looked up to see Gwen staring into his eyes. Curiously. Only then did he realize he had overstepped his own borders.
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, you know. Just how dogs are.”
It wasn’t the truth. But it was the level of truth you share with a new grocery checker at the market. Like when they ask how you are and you say you’re fine. No matter how you are. And that’s all they really wanted from you anyway.
“That’s true,” she said, and handed him the change and his receipt.
Before he stepped away from the checkout counter, Aiden looked around at his ranch hand.
“Trey,” he said. A simple greeting.
Trey raised his eyebrows but nothing more.
Aiden stepped out onto the street and stood at the curb under a post light, holding his rapidly defrosting lasagna and staring down at the dog. A yellow lab, maybe, only not a full one. Sixty pounds easily. The dog stared up at Aiden and wagged cautiously. Aiden didn’t want to touch the dog, because he didn’t know for a fact that it wouldn’t bite. Neither did he want to leave it alone to its fear.
A moment later Trey appeared near his left arm and began to untie the dog’s leash.
“This your dog, Trey?”
“It is. Yeah.”
“How come I never saw him before?”
“Just got ’im.”
“What happened to your other dog?”
“Useless cur,” Trey said, like spitting out something bad tasting. “Doesn’t even bark at noises. Licks burglars, I swear. Gave ’im to my stepmom. Hey. Aiden. You do remember you have a girlfriend. Right?”
Aiden felt his back stiffen. “How could I not remember that?”
“Good question. How could you not? Watching you talk to that pretty new checker, seemed like it might’ve slipped your mind. Her name is Olivia, by the way, your girlfriend. Just to refresh your memory. If you ever decide you don’t want her, I’ll be happy to take ’er off your hands.”
“Take her off my hands? She’s not a sack of cornmeal, Trey.”
“I know it. Just sayin’.
”
Then Trey took the end of his leash and his new dog and his six-pack and disappeared into the dark of the evening.
Livie arrived at eight, walked straight into Aiden’s kitchen, and opened the oven door, peering inside.
She was wearing those skinny jeans and a top that showed off her midsection. Her dark-blonde hair was disorganized and casual in a premeditated way, one it might have taken her a good part of the afternoon to achieve.
“Frozen lasagna?” she asked. It was clear by her tone what she thought of frozen lasagna, and it was not good.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, leaning in the kitchen doorway.
“Trey said you went hunting at the end of the day.”
“When did you talk to Trey?”
“He calls now and again.”
“Does he now? You think that’s appropriate?”
“Do I think what’s appropriate?”
She closed the oven door at long last. It settled something in Aiden’s stomach. He hadn’t liked all that heat getting out. But Livie tended not to take well to any sort of correction.
“Him calling you,” Aiden said.
“He’s harmless enough. My point is, I kind of had my mouth all set for that venison sausage you make.”
“You have any idea how long it takes to process out the meat like that?”
“Would have been nice to at least see that process . . . in . . . you know. Process. So you came home empty-handed?”
“Yeah,” Aiden said. “I did.”
For a moment he was looking at something else. Through the kitchen window at a movement in the pasture that proved only to be two of the brood mares scuffling over a hay feeder. Then her silence drew his attention back. He looked into her face to see it steaming with fury. It made something inside him shut down. Hang out the “Closed” sign and switch off all the lights.
“I can’t believe you, Aiden.”
“What can’t you believe?” he asked, because it would have been dangerous to say nothing.
“I can’t believe you just looked right into my face and lied to me.”
Actually, Aiden thought, I was looking out the window at the time. As he thought it, he did so again.
“I didn’t lie,” he said, wondering, as he said it, if he could somehow twist it into being true.
“So you didn’t bag an eight-point buck out there today? Because I heard you did. I heard you gave it away. And that you brought it back not even dressed out, and nobody can figure why, because usually you’re so damned predictable about things like that. All about your routines. And did you ever think before you gave it away that I might have wanted venison?”
Aiden wanted to ask how. How had she heard all that? But it would have been a pointless question. One person had known. Derek. In a small town full of cell phones and small-town interests, the travel of information never took long.
“I didn’t lie,” Aiden said again. “I didn’t say I didn’t bag anything. You asked if I got home empty-handed. This is my home. This house. And by the time I got back to the house, I had nothing.”
A silence, during which he did not dare look into her face.
“That is absolutely pathetic,” she said.
Yes, he thought. That was pathetic.
“I might just spend tonight on my own,” she added.
“Take this bottle of wine,” Aiden said. “You know I won’t drink it.”
In the crackling silence that followed, he realized he had said the wrong thing. He should have said, “No, Livie. Don’t go.” But the idea of spending the evening alone—not affronted, not on thin ice, unguarded—felt positively compelling to Aiden. Something he would have actively sought had he realized he was within his rights to want it.
She shook her head and stomped to the door, ignoring the bottle of wine that he held in her direction. At the door she stopped and leveled him with another look. He forced himself to meet her eyes. Her left one was slightly askew, looking too much toward her own nose. Normally Aiden found it adorable. In that moment it only looked like a flaw.
“What else do you lie to me about?”
“I don’t lie to you.”
“That’s what I used to think, but now I don’t know. Trey said you seem a little sweet on that new checker at Warner’s.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because all she did was ring up my groceries and we talked a few sentences about a whining dog. Trey is sweet on you, in case you haven’t noticed, and if there’s anything he can say to drive a wedge between us, then that’s what he’ll say. I didn’t lie about the buck. Just didn’t go into every detail. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about much. Not right then, anyway.”
He watched her for a time. Watched her shoulders soften. For a moment he thought she might stay, which felt disappointing. He needed to be alone. Needed it sorely. More than he could entirely fathom. Certainly more than he could have communicated.
“Tell me the truth now, then,” Livie said. “Why’d you bring that damn thing home without even dressing it out? Why’d you give it away to Derek when you know fresh venison’s my favorite?”
Aiden sighed. He backed up a few steps to the couch and sank down into a seat. Sighed again. Pressed his face into his hands briefly.
“I just didn’t want to cut into it. Him. Into his . . . body. It was his body. I can’t explain it any better than that. I didn’t want his blood all over me. I didn’t want to see his guts. Can you understand that?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sure, Aiden. I can understand that fine. Just not from you. How many deer you dressed out in your time? A hundred?”
“Maybe.”
“So what changed all of a sudden today?”
“I wish I knew.”
He looked at the rug for a long moment. Not up at Livie. Not in any way.
A minute later he heard the door thump closed. When he looked up, she was gone. A load of stress drained out of his belly.
He sighed and closed his eyes as he felt it go.
Aiden ate the frozen lasagna. All of it. Even though it was clearly intended to serve two.
It was still a little bit frozen in the middle.
He ate it anyway.
Chapter Six
The Roundup
It was the following week, eight in the morning on roundup day, and summer had decided to arrive early—when the calendar said barely spring. It was already over eighty degrees. Not a cloud in the sky. The bake of the sun was a bear, even at its distinct morning slant.
Aiden’s property was dotted with three-quarter-ton and one-ton pickup trucks hitched to stock trailers, left to sit with their trailers’ rear gates yawning open. The neighboring ranchers came on roundup day, and they brought their horses. They brought their families. They helped rope and tag and castrate. Then Aiden would feed them a good barbecue and all the beer they could drink, and when their roundup time came, he would return the favor.
It’s just the way things were done. Had always been done.
Aiden sat his paint gelding, Mather, in the roping pen, swinging his rope, surrounded by a shifting sea of cattle. Lowing, bellowing cattle. About a hundred head. The sound of their comments was ceaseless. They could and would express themselves all damn day.
He used his legs to guide the horse, who was in a distinctly skittish mood. It was unlike the paint to be skittish. It was unlike any of his horses to be anything but quietly resigned to his or her work.
Aiden let the rope fly and caught a calf around his back legs. He pulled the rope tight and it took the animal off his feet. The calf landed with an audible thump and a puff of dry dirt. Aiden winced. For a moment he just sat his horse and held the rope taut. In that moment he did not do what was needed of him next.
His job, along with both his ranch hands and one older next-door neighbor named Roger, was to drag the calves by their back legs to the men who would tie their legs up in front, tag their ears, castrate the m
ales.
Even the act of dragging the calf across the pen felt unthinkable.
The calf thrashed and kicked and tried to regain his feet, and Aiden felt the animal’s fear like a knife wound. A brand-new wound to add to all the others. The paint danced beneath him, wanting to know why Aiden was afraid. Trying to understand whether Aiden knew something he did not.
You’ll get through this, Aiden said to himself for the hundredth time that morning. Swallow it down and do what you need to do.
He pressed his heels to the paint’s sides.
The gelding surged forward too suddenly, dragging the calf violently through the dirt for several feet. The calf bellowed out in panic, and Aiden caught it like a cold, only more immediate. Aiden’s horse spun and stood facing the calf, which was not a tenable position. A grown steer ran between Aiden and his calf, catching his horns on the rope, pulling it sideways, pressing the rope against a front leg of the gelding, who surged forward again into a full-on spook—and stumbled badly.
Aiden’s gut jolted with panic. Partly because he thought the horse would go down. Partly because Mather felt a jolt of panic thinking he would go down.
The gelding caught himself, regained his balance—then exploded into bucking.
Aiden grabbed the saddle horn, squeezed with his legs, and sat the first three spirited bucks. The fourth sent him flying. He landed in the dirt, wrenching his shoulder and smacking his head hard enough to see stars.
He drew up onto his knees and reached for his hat, vaguely hearing hoots of laughter in his ears. They sounded far away. He watched the gelding tear around the big pipe corral, dragging the bellowing calf behind, cattle dashing out of their way like water parting. Now and then one tripped on the rope or stepped on the calf as he was dragged by.
“What the hell was that, Aiden?” Derek’s voice made its way across the pen to him. “I watched you ride four, five years now and never saw no gelding set you on your ass in the dirt like that.”
Aiden felt his face redden. He pulled to his feet, though it hurt to do so. Though he could have used more time to stitch himself together. He likely had a concussion from the feel of it. But it was humiliating to come off your horse in front of just about everybody you knew—roundup, of all days—and nothing was more important than to prove you were tough enough to shake it off. Whether that was the truth of the situation or not.
The Wake Up Page 6
