by Anna Jeffrey
Pic gave her a look. He hadn’t noticed her shoes. Dressed as she was, he doubted there was a man alive who would notice the color of her shoes.
With the day more than half gone, instead of going to the mesa, Pic chose to drive a shorter distance to a narrow canyon that had been dammed and turned into a small reservoir for drinking water for the cattle. “Who are you taking pictures for?” he asked her.
“It’s a magazine. Texas, Our Texas!”
“Ah,” Pic said, tilting his chin. “Don’t think I know that one.”
“It’s a small magazine.”
“How many other ranches have you taken pictures of?”
“Actually, this is my first one. If I do well with this one, maybe it’ll be enough. Perhaps I won’t try to photograph more.”
That answer was a definite maybe and left him puzzled. Hadn’t she said she was doing a piece on old Texas ranches? Plural?
This seemed like the perfect opportunity to address her going to the bunkhouse. “Zoshi, you’re welcome to take pictures just about anywhere on the ranch, but I need to ask you not to go into the bunkhouse. That’s home to the ranch hands who live there and some of them don’t want to be photographed.”
“Oh. Well, no one said I couldn’t go there. Besides, it was just something to do. How far do we have to drive?”
His admonishment apparently had made no impression. He wasn’t even sure if she had understood what he meant. “Not too far,” he said, still waiting for some kind of defense against his reprimand. “Since we got a late start, I figure we’ll go over to this tank that’s kind of pretty. Some cattle are usually lazing around the edge of it and there are some big and real old live oak trees.”
“What’s a tank.”
Pic’s eyes widened. The word “tank” was common vernacular in Texas. “It’s a watering hole. Some people might call it a pond. Austin is surrounded by ranches. I imagine all of them refer to their watering holes as tanks.”
“I’ve never been to a ranch.”
End of conversation. No point in talking about how he and Smoky had found a spring in the bottom of a dry arroyo and developed it and created a small oasis. A lot of the tanks depended on rain for water, but this one had a constant water level even late in the summer. He presumed underground springs fed into it. It was a good source of drinking water for the stock and a good place for them to rest. At the edge of it, the temperature felt a little cooler. He could hardly wait to get there.
As they crept alongside a copse of ancient live oaks and thick cedar, Pic couldn’t keep from stealing glances at her bare skin, covered with a sheen of perspiration. Johnnie Sue’s remark about her top barely holding her ample breasts was right on. He couldn’t keep his mind from wandering to her coming to the guesthouse door naked except for a sheet, then getting into the shower with him still standing in the doorway.
All at once, rustling and movement of the brush interrupted his aberrant thoughts. He spotted two huge hogs rooting in the underbrush. He slammed on the brake, causing Zoshi to lurch forward. “Oh. Sorry,” he said, grabbing his rifle from the gun rack.
He clambered out of the Jeep, took a rest on the roof and fired. Blam!
A shrill scream came from inside the Jeep.
His heart slammed against his ribcage. He ducked his head back inside. Zoshi was sitting with her shoulders scrunched up, her eyes squeezed shut and her fingers in her ears, the pounding of her heart obvious in her chest.
Oh, shit! “Ma’am, are you all right?”
She yanked off her sunglasses and glowered, her deep brown eyes shiny with tears, her mascara smudged. “I didn’t know you were going to shoot something.”
“I said I was back at the house. It’s why I brought the rifle.”
“But I didn’t think it would really happen.” She broke into tears and buried her face in her hands.
Shit!
He looked toward where he had hit one of the hogs. The second hog was nowhere to be seen. Dammit, if she hadn’t screamed, he could have gotten both of them. He cussed under his breath, blaming himself. If he had told her what was going on, maybe she wouldn’t have screamed and maybe he could have gotten the second shot off. He pulled his bandana from his back pocket and handed it to her. “Here.”
She stopped crying, glared at the bandana, then up at him, sniffling.
“It’s clean,” he said, unable to suppress his irritation. “The woman who does the laundry even starched and ironed it.”
She took it and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ve never been around shooting.”
This was rural Texas, where varmints thrived and hunting was excellent, especially for hogs. Pic could think of not one living soul he knew who had never been around shooting. He didn’t know what to say. So he chose to deal with the more pressing requirement of the moment. “Hot as it is, I gotta get that hog outta that brush.”
He climbed behind the wheel, jerked the Jeep into gear and bumped across the uneven pasture toward the hog carcass. When they reached it, he said, “This’ll take just a few minutes.” He stepped out of the Jeep, walked over and inspected his kill.
“Is it—is it dead?” she called to him from the passenger seat, a quiver in her voice.
He looked up and saw her head poked out the window. “Dead as a doornail. Damn good shot, too, even if I say so myself. Right through the heart.”
He walked back to the jeep, opened the backend, dragged out a length of rope and his hunting knife. Returning to the hog carcass, he unhooked his phone from his belt and called the foreman. “Smoky, I shot a hog out here in that little bunch of juniper brush close to the spring tank. Get somebody to come out here and pick it up. If anybody wants it to eat, y’all oughtta get out here quick ’cause this temperature would make Hell seem cold.”
“We’re on it,” the foreman said.
“I’m giving a tour of the ranch, so I’ve got a guest with me. We need to get moving, but I’ll stay here ’til you get here.”
Pic disconnected, thankful for the cell phone service at this location. A cell phone was useless at many spots on the ranch. He hooked his phone back on his belt, bent forward, grabbed the hog’s hind feet and struggled to drag the dead weight out of the brush into a clearing.
“Did you say ‘wants it to eat’?” Zoshi called from the passenger seat. “What does that mean? Someone is going to eat that?”
“No point in wasting it.”
Certain Zoshi had never seen an animal carcass butchered, he positioned his body between her line of sight and the hog while he dealt with it. All through the process, he felt guilty for making her cry.
After he had the carcass hanging from a limb and bleeding out, he walked back over to the Jeep. Blood stained his jeans and T-shirt. Zoshi’s face was a frozen mask of horror. “Please take me back to the cabin,” she said in a small voice.
“I will, ma’am. I will. Just as soon as Smoky gets here. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t let that hog lay out in this heat. I don’t want the meat to spoil.”
He walked to the back of the Jeep, opened the back door and dug a rag out of the toolbox. While he wiped his bloody knife clean, she sat in the passenger seat weeping. “You shouldn’t have killed it,” she said between sobs.
He walked around to the passenger door, placed his hands on the windowsill and bent down to look at her. “Look, it’s okay. It won’t go to waste. The hands in the bunkhouse will cook it up and enjoy it. It’s good meat. Healthier than domestic pigs. It’s real lean. Cooked right, it’s fork-tender. What do you think we had for dinner?”
An even more horrified expression contorted her face. “That stew? Oh, my God!”
Her hands flew to cover her mouth and nose. The door latch popped, the door hit him and she scrambled out. She stumbled a few steps, then fell onto her knees and lost her dinner on the ground.
“Oh, shit.” Pic hurried over and dropped to a crouch beside her. “Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am?”
She shook her head, bawling and co
ughing and spitting up. He grabbed the bandana off the ground, quickstepped to the rear door of the Jeep, pulled out the cooler of ice water Johnnie had fixed for them and soaked the bandana. He returned to where she was still on her hands and knees crying. He squatted beside her and tried to help her mop her face.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried, jerking the bandana away from him. “Just leave me alone.” She wailed into the bandanna.
Panic seized Pic. Jesus! Other than his mother, he had been around very few wailing women. “Ma’am, listen to me.” He gently put an arm around Zoshi’s shoulders and tried to urge her to her feet. “You need to stand up. You’ll get full of grassburrs and you might get ant bit.”
“What? Oh, my God!” She sprang to an upright posture and stamped her feet up and down. “Oh! Oh! Oh, my God! What kind of ants?”
He grasped her arm, bent and began to brush the grassburrs and dirt off her knees. “Calm down, okay? You’re okay. Fire ants mostly nowadays. They mostly ate up the good ants. Their stings are harmless unless you’re allergic, but they’re painful.”
She broke into another high-pitched wail. “I hate ants. I hate insects. Can I just go back to the cabin?”
Now annoyance mixed with Pic’s panic and he could hardly wait to escape from what had become a huge pain in the ass. “Ma’am, I’ll take you back in just a little bit.” He walked her the few steps back to the Jeep. “Just sit down in the Jeep and rest a minute.” He opened the passenger door. “You want a cool drink of water?”
“I just want to go back to the cabin,” she sobbed.
“I’ve got to wait here for our foreman to come get that hog. Then I’ll take you back, okay?” He helped her seat herself in the Jeep’s passenger seat.
“What difference does it make?” she whined, still crying. “Why do we have to wait? Why can’t we go now?”
“Because, darlin’. If nobody’s here to protect a dead animal, the buzzards and the coyotes will show up. Or maybe even another hog or two.”
She dissolved into a new spate of tears. He released a sigh. Smoky, where are you?
“Look,” he said. “You’re not in any danger. If you think you are, lock your door. It won’t take Smoky long to get here.”
He had no sooner said it than Smoky and a ranch hand showed up on ATVs, one pulling a flatbed trailer. They would gut the hog before loading it onto the trailer. No telling how Zoshi would react to that. Pic had to get her away before they started.
Smoky walked over and inspected the hog and Pic joined him. “Hey, good shot, boss,” Laughing, Smoky raised his palm for a high five and Pic complied. “That sucker must weigh about six hundred pounds That with the new BAR?”
Pic laughed, too. “Damn straight. I didn’t like that rifle at first, but I’m starting to love it. There were two of ’em, but I didn’t get a shot at the second one.”
“Too bad,” Smokey said, taking his knife out of its holder on his belt. “We could’ve put it in the freezer.”
“Listen, my passenger is feeling a little sick,” Pic said hurriedly. “I’ve gotta leave this up to you.”
He returned to the Jeep and climbed behind the wheel. Zoshi was no longer crying. She appeared to be calmer. In fact, she appeared to be in a trance.
He fired the engine and started back toward the guesthouse. A grinding hour later, he came to a stop in front of it. She had said not one word since they left the tank. Not wanting to agitate her further, he hadn’t spoken either. He turned off the engine, pulled on the door latch and started to step out.
“I’ve never been around killing things,” she said, stuffy-nosed.”
“I should’ve thought of that,” he said. “I guess I should apologize. And I do. But maybe you should look at in a different way. These feral hogs are a blight to farmers and ranchers. It’d be nice to wave a magic wand and get rid of them, but that ain’t happening. So we’ve got no choice but to kill ’em. Maybe that’s something you could put into the story you’re doing.”
The glare she leveled at him would have roasted that whole pig. “But you don’t have to eat it,” she snapped.
Flummoxed, he stared at her. “What, you think it would’ve been better to just let it lay and invite every damn carnivorous varmint from miles around?”
“What I think is that you shouldn’t have killed it in the first place.”
Now his frustration grew to the size of a mountain. He couldn’t get away from her fast enough. He scooted out of his seat and rounded the Jeep’s backend to open her door, but she was already out when he reached her. “Look, I feel bad we didn’t get any pictures today. Guess we can try it again tomorrow, huh? We’ll go up on the mesa. I’ll get my chores done early in the morning and we can leave a little earlier, before it gets so hot.”
She nodded, looking down.
He walked to the Jeep’s backend and dragged out her tripod and backpack, carried it into the guesthouse living room and set it on the floor near the front door. She stood in the middle of the room, looking at the floor, not removing her sunglasses.
“You coming over for supper?” he asked. “Johnnie Sue’s been smoking a brisket all day.”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry. After today, I might never eat meat again….Besides that, I don’t think your maid likes me.”
Chapter 13
An earthquake was going on inside Xochimilka’s head and body. She had thought she would never get back to the cabin and escape her Neanderthal guide. As soon as he shut the front door, she tramped straight to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Then she showered, scrubbing her whole body with soap and a loofah, and shampooed her hair for the second time today. Afterward, she brushed her teeth again. She couldn’t seem to get clean enough.
Feeling only a little better after her shower, she dropped into an oversized chair and clicked on the TV, but she neither saw it nor heard it. Replaying the afternoon used her total focus. An image of Pic Lockhart stringing up that poor dead pig on a tree limb wouldn’t leave her mind. These people were barbarians. She had never wanted to come here and do this. What had her parents gotten her into? Or to be more precise, what had her mother gotten her into?
As those questions tumbled through her mind and misery cloaked her, Xochimilka’s phone buzzed. She checked Caller ID, turned down the TV volume and keyed into the call. “Hi, Mom.”
“Darling, how are you?” her mother gushed “Have you been out getting some good photographs? Have you met Pic yet?”
Her mother’s excitement rushed at her through the phone. Xochimilka fought not to break into tears again. Her nose was already plugged, her eyes swollen and sore. “I went out with him today to shoot pictures, but it didn’t work out.”
“Aw, I’m sorry. Do you have a cold, dear?”
“It must be allergies. There are a lot of allergens in the air here.”
“What do you think of Pic? Do you like him?”
Xochimilka could no longer restrain herself. She broke into a wail. “Mom, he’s a redneck animal….He wears a gun. This place…it’s like some…some Bacchanalian orgy.” Her voice hitched. “He killed a pig. Then he gave it to the ranch workers to eat. And they all made jokes about it.”
Silence on the other end of the line. Finally, her mother cleared her throat. “Dear, I know you have a wonderful and colorful imagination, but you have to realize you’re in a rural area. And life on a cattle ranch is very different from the life you’ve known in Austin. You’re going to have to be…well, open minded.”
Who was her mother kidding? Annunciata McLaren knew nothing of life in the Texas backwoods. As far as Xochimilka knew, her mother had never been out of Austin except to travel often to New York or Ireland once and Italy to visit her family.
“Mom, this is an awful place. Coyotes howl at night. I tried to take some pictures yesterday of the barns and the horses, but the stench was so bad I couldn’t stand it. And these people around here are awful. The workers are smelly and dirty.”
“Why are you ar
ound the workers?”
“No one was here to help me find things to photograph, so I tried to take pictures of the bunkhouse.”
“Betty Lockhart has told me that the Double-Barrel Ranch is beautiful. And extremely comfortable.”
Xochimilka looked around at the sumptuous furnishings. “It’s all right, I guess. I’m staying in this guesthouse. It’s nice. But I’m going to have to clean it myself. They have this maid who acts like she’s in charge of everything, but I don’t think she cleans anything. She’s rude and obnoxious and she doesn’t like me.”
“Aww. Why, dear?”
“I’m not fond of the menu she serves. I suppose she resents that. You know I don’t eat a lot of red meat.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t having a good experience. Betty has told me wonderful things about her family.”
“Mom, didn’t you hear me? She’s the maid, not family. And these people eat wild pigs. I can’t eat things like that. If I want food, I’m going to have to drive somewhere tomorrow to buy it. And I think the nearest town is forty miles away. Can you send me some money?”
“Zochimilka, listen to me,” her mother said firmly. “You are going to have to do this on your own. Your father’s patience is wearing thin. He is not supporting me on this and I cannot defy him. I’ve researched the Lockharts. Everyone who is anyone in Texas knows them. Even the governor. They are very wealthy. They own even more land than I first thought. They have oil. And the oldest son is a Texas celebrity.”
Xochimilka swallowed her tears and stared at the TV screen where clowns were dancing in silence. “I’m trying, Mom. But it’s so hard.”
“You must keep your eye on the reason for your visit there. Texas Monthly is going to pay you a nice fee for your piece.”
Xochimilka wanted to scream. A prestigious magazine like Texas Monthly would never buy photographs or anything else from her. “It isn’t Texas Monthly, Mother. It’s Texas, Our Texas!. It’s a nothing magazine that no one has ever heard of.”
“Well, whatever. You must concentrate on doing a good job. You know I persuaded your father to use his influence to arrange this opportunity for you. He’s still against it.”
