by Anna Jeffrey
“I learned a little about history in college,” she said. “Mostly related to politics.”
He ignored that comment, suspecting that a conversation with her about politics would only tighten the tension between them. “What I told you about this yucca plant? In a magazine article, you could write about that.”
“Why? I mean, what’s the point?”
“You could point out the power of Nature and the geologic events that shaped what’s around us. Like I said before, for that plant to grow, a seed had to be deposited here at some point. It took a bird or the wind or a wandering animal to bring it to this place. So you could write about the enormity of one tiny seed taking root on solid rock and thriving. That’s all I’m saying.”
She chewed on her lower lip. “I hadn’t thought about writing something. I’m just taking pictures.”
Pic was even more puzzled. He knew almost nothing about journalism, but in his mind, a magazine article would include writing as well as pictures. “Okay. Then let’s get pictures. Let me take a few.”
He thought, but didn’t say, Otherwise we’ll be here cooking in the sun all day long.
He took the camera from her and began to snap—the panoramic landscape, plants, lizards and insects. She stood by in silence and let him.
Finally, he returned the camera to her. “Maybe you’ll find one or two in that bunch that you can use.”
The sun continued to hurl down blasts of pure fire. He pegged the temperature at a hundred plus. The back of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. Her shoulders and breasts shone with perspiration. “Let’s sit down out of the sun and eat lunch,” he said.
She went to her backpack and took out something wrapped in a piece of paper towel. He dragged the cooler Johnnie Sue had packed and the jug of water out of the Jeep’s backend and they climbed inside the Jeep. The interior felt like a sauna but was a relief from the direct sun. Johnnie Sue had put plastic cups and napkins in the cooler, so he poured cups of ice water, handed her one, then handed her some napkins.
She pulled off her sunglasses and hung them by the earpiece in the middle of her top, then opened her own napkin and lifted out a sandwich. She raised a corner of the top slice of bread and looked at the filling. “It’s peanut butter and grape jelly,” she said and laughed. “I eat peanut butter a lot.”
Remembering Johnnie Sue’s sarcasm back in the kitchen, Pic laughed, too. “You can’t beat that,” he said, taking out his own he-man sandwich made of roast beef slices, lettuce and tomato slices all stacked on thick slices of homemade bread. “When I was a kid, I thought peanut butter and jelly was a feast. My mom didn’t let us have a lot of junk food.”
They chewed in silence for a few beats. “You sure you don’t want a bite of roast beef? This is an awful good sandwich. Homemade bread. Johnnie Sue’s a helluva good cook.”
“I’m fine,” she said, munching on her sandwich. And she seemed to be fine. Content with her peanut butter and jelly.
Finally, Pic asked her the question that had been bugging him ever since he saw her ineptitude with the camera. “How long have you been a photographer?”
She huffed a laugh. “Three days. You’ve probably figured out that I know almost nothing about photography.”
Her answer didn’t surprise him, but the honesty of it did. “And a magazine hired you to take pictures?”
“It wasn’t quite that simple.” She finished the last of her sandwich and wadded her napkin into a neat ball. “I’m, uh, between jobs. My father has a friend who’s some kind of editor at Texas, Our Texas!. He told him his daughter might have a contact with an owner of an old ranch, meaning your mom. The editor asked my father if I could get some pictures. He told them yes, so they decided to do a story about old Texas ranches.”
Mom. Shit. She was trying to manipulate him. Well, he wasn’t falling for it. He reached for one of the apples Johnnie Sue had put into the cooler, then dug into his pocket and pulled out his pocketknife.
“You carry a knife?” Zochi asked, a little quiver in her voice.
Pic knew no males who didn’t carry a pocketknife. Even his suave big brother, who became more citified every day, carried a pocketknife. “Don’t tell me you object to pocketknives, too.” He sliced the apple in half, then quarters, cut out the core and offered a quarter to her.
“I don’t know anyone who has a knife,” she said, taking the piece of apple.
Mental eye roll. After a conversation about guns, he didn’t want to have one about knives.
He bit into an apple slice. “I could tell you’re not an experienced photographer,” he said, chewing. “So if not photography, what are you experienced at?”
“Nothing that amounts to anything. I have a degree in political science. But it’s never done me much good.”
That explained her remark about learning history in college. There was a hell of a wide span between photography and political science. So was she one of those political animals? Did that explain her attitude about killing hogs and eating meat? “Why aren’t you doing something in that field? With all the politicians down there in Austin, it seems like the perfect place to use a poli-sci degree.”
“I hate politics. I hate politicians.”
She sure hated a lot of things. He had lost track of everything she said she hated. He glanced at her across his shoulder. A tiny piece of apple had fallen on the slope of her breast. His first impulse was to pick it off, but he caught himself before he touched her. “You’ve got a little bit of apple—” He pointed at the piece, his finger only inches from it.
She looked down, picked it off and popped it into her mouth. Then she wiped her breast with her fingers. A twitch stirred in his shorts. Oooh, boy! He quickly produced a napkin form the lunch cooler and handed it to her.
She took it from him, tilted the water jug and wet the napkin with ice water. Then she reached inside her top and wiped her breasts with the soaked napkin. “Oh, my God,” she gasped in her breathy voice. “That feels sooo good. I am sooo hot.”
Right before his eyes, her nipples peaked and showed through her top. A spike of adrenaline struck Pic’s groin. His mouth went dry. He fought the reaction. He grabbed his cup of water and threw back a drink, followed by finishing off the cup.
She handed the soaked napkin to him and looked up at him with those coffee-dark eyes. Their gazes locked for a few seconds. He swallowed again.
She swallowed, too. “Can—can we go back now?”
He gave himself a mental shake. “Yeah, we should. I think we’ve got all the pictures you need and I’m about to melt.” In more ways than one, he thought, but didn’t say.
She re-packed her backpack. He stowed it in the back of the Jeep, cranked the engine, backed in an arc and started back down the rugged road.
“I’m sure—I’m sure you got some shots I’ll be able to use,” she said, her voice even breathier than usual. “You don’t mind if I use them, do you?”
“If I minded, I wouldn’t have done it. I was trying to do you a favor.”
Chapter 16
On the way back to the guesthouse, after long minutes of silence and crawling over the two-track trail across the pasture, Pic’s passenger said, “You have an unusual name, too.”
“Pic? I guess it is. I’ve never run across anybody else with the same name. It’s short for Pickett, my mom’s maiden name. My other name is Charles. I like Pic better. I can’t see myself as Charles. Or Chuck or Charlie either.”
“I can’t see you with one of those names either.” She laughed. He hadn’t heard her laugh and she sounded like a little girl.
More silence followed while she looked out over the empty prairie. For some reason, they hadn’t even seen a cow up close. Too hot. They were probably all bunched up somewhere in the shade.
“Oh, there’s an oil well,” she said and Pic looked across the prairie at a see-sawing pump jack in the distance. “That one was developed last year,” he said.
“How many oil wells do you have?”
Pic almost said a hundred or so before something told him not to answer that question. No doubt she would have an opinion about it. “I don’t know. That’s my dad’s domain.”
“That’s why your family is so rich, isn’t it? Y’all have been lucky. And you probably don’t care that products made from oil are destroying our planet.”
Pic flinched. “That’s propaganda,” he said sharply.
“No, it isn’t. Look what drilling for oil did in the Gulf of Mexico just a few years ago. There’s science that—”
Pic’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, but he schooled himself to reply in a neutral tone. “Ma’am, are you gonna give up driving your car? Or the million uses for plastic products or wearing clothes made out of synthetics?”
“Of course not.”
“Then we don’t need to be having this conversation. Just stop and think about what you’re saying. It’s not even logical to think that human beings can destroy the planet. And it’s arrogant. Nature is monumentally more powerful than puny little humans. I see it every day and it humbles me.”
Her pink lips pursed. He could almost imagine her lower lip poked out. “You probably have those gas wells, too,” she said petulantly.
He looked at her, trying to not let his irritation turn to anger. “The ranch is in the Barnett shale area, yeah. So what?”
“Fracking is poisoning our drinking water.”
“You know what? We’ve got dozens of water wells on this ranch and not a damn one of them has bad drinking water. And we know that because we constantly test them. There’s not a water well on this place that I’m afraid to drink from.”
Silence. That suited him fine. Every subject was a contest with her, even it if was something she knew nothing about.
Long minutes passed. They were almost back to the guesthouse and he could hardly wait to get there.
“This is really a big area with nothing in it,” she said. “How big is your ranch?”
He hesitated again. The Double-Barrel’s land ownership as well as its drilled wells were public information. He could tell her that if she wanted to know facts like that she would have to look them up in the public records at the courthouse, but he saw no point in being so mean. “Three hundred twenty sections, give or take.”
“I don’t know how big that is.”
“A section is six hundred forty acres. The Double-Barrel is a little over two hundred thousand acres.”
Her head snapped in his direction and she gasped, her eyes wide with indignation and her perfect lips parted. “Why, that’s obscene. That’s awful. And oil and gas, too. It isn’t fair to own so much.”
Fair? What the hell did she mean? He gave her a look, trying to decide if she had insulted him. And trying to reconcile if he was duty-bound to be confronted and insulted by somebody who was eating off the ranch’s table, sleeping in one of the ranch’s beds and wasting the general manager’s time. If Mom and some magazine had sent her up here to do an article, shouldn’t she have already been told commonly-known details about the Double-Barrel? “I don’t own it. The family owns it. My mom must’ve told you that. She owns part of it, too.”
“That doesn’t make it any more acceptable.”
Acceptable? To whom? One worry that never crossed Pic’s mind was whether anybody thought the size of the Double Barrel Ranch was acceptable.
He tried to be an even-tempered person, but nothing could raise his hackles quicker than hearing some Austin do-gooder who didn’t know shit about the risk-taking in oil and gas exploration or cattle ranching or the positive results thereof pass judgment on his family. “This place has been owned by my family since 1850. My ancestors fought for it. Some of them died for it. All of us work every day to manage it and preserve it for future generations. It’s part of the fabric of the state, the whole country when you think about it.”
“It isn’t right for one person to have so much land that’s used to feed animals that produce an unhealthy product.”
Right? Who the hell was she to determine what was right? But instead of arguing, he called on his last shred of patience. “I guess I’m not surprised that a non-beef eater would feel that way. Anything can be unhealthy if it’s misused or abused. The beef industry feeds a lot of folks, all over the world. And most of America likes eating beef. Just like oil, there are plenty of by-products from cattle.”
“Name one.”
Not only was the most pigheaded person he had ever been around, she didn’t appear to be very bright. “How about shoes?”
She hesitated. Her mouth opened as if to argue, but closed again. “Just forget it,” she said tersely. “I don’t know why I said anything. How long before we get back to the cabin?”
Cabin? A memory flitted through his mind of when Mom had remodeled and redecorated the guesthouse. Every visitor who had ever stayed in it had commented about how great it was. “Not long,” he answered just as tersely. “And it’s not a cabin. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a pretty damn comfortable guesthouse. Bigger and better than a lot of people’s homes.”
They rode in silence the rest of the way to guesthouse. The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached it. He dutifully unloaded her gear from the backend of the Jeep and carried it inside. As he set her backpack and tripod on the floor inside the front door, she came to him and looked up at him without her hat and sunglasses. “I didn’t mean to be argumentative she said breathily. “I’m grateful for your help.”
Damn, there was just something about that voice….“That’s fine, ma’am. My mom made a commitment to you and I’ll honor it as long as you’re here.” He turned to go, eager to get away from her.
“Pic?”
He turned back. She looked up at him. Her eyes glistened. Tears? Couldn’t be.
“I know I’ve been awful.” A tear leaked onto one cheek. Drawing a deep breath and closing her eyes, she raised her hands with splayed fingers that framed her face. “I’m…I’m really frustrated. My life’s kind of a mess right now. This whole photography thing is this frantic effort on my parents’ part to help me get started in something. I’ve—I’ve never been very successful at anything and they think I’m not worth much.”
Pic couldn’t imagine. Neither of his parents had ever instilled in him and his siblings the feeling that they weren’t worth much. In fact, his parents thought just the opposite. “I’m sure you’re wrong about that, Zochi. I doubt if your parents really feel that way. There’s nobody who isn’t worth much.”
“They’re both so smart and have done so well. They’re very good at what they do.”
“What do they do?”
“They’re professors. At UT. My dad teaches French history and my mom teaches Romance languages. She speaks all five of the Romance languages and I can barely manage English.”
College professors? And neither one of them taught something that society really needed, like engineering or medicine. He couldn’t imagine why anybody, especially their daughter, would feel inferior to them.
Pic had two college degrees himself. Back when he had been in school, except for a few science and math classes, he had found almost no common ground with most of his professors. Except for art, he had never made a good grade in a liberal arts class, whereas in history and science classes he had excelled. But this wasn’t the time to voice his opinion of academia.
Knowing who her parents were explained a lot about her. “Wow,” was all he could say.
“I was against coming here to do this,” Zochi went on, now sniffling. “But my mom and your mom started talking about it and the idea just seemed to run away with itself. Please. I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
From just those few words, Pic began to see her in a new light. He felt sorry for her. She, too, was being manipulated. Baffled by why people didn’t mind their own fuckin’ business and let people live their own lives, he let out a great breath and looked at the wall behind her. “Ma’am, I’m not mad. It takes a lot to get me mad.�
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“Can’t you say my name? Do you have to call me ma’am?”
“No, ma’am. I mean I need to get on up to the house, Zochi. Tell you what. We’ll start over tomorrow. Go to the old original ranch house like Dad suggested. That’ll be a shorter trip.”
Had he lost his mind? The sensible part of him did not want to waste another day. Some other part that seemed to be determined not to give up its place in the far reaches of his system wanted something else. But what the hell was it? He didn’t like her much, even after she had tried to explain herself, but she was like a damn magnet that kept drawing him in her direction.
She sniffled and smiled. “Thank you.” She rose on her tiptoes, cupped his jaw with her palm and chastely brushed his lips with hers. “Thank you,” she said again, her palm falling away from his cheek.
An insane part of him wanted to grasp her hand and put it back against his jaw, for he liked her touch. The tension built by his own primal urges, the hours they had spent in a closed-in space and the co-mingled scents of their overheated bodies threatened to suffocate him. He caved. He clutched her shoulders, their lips found each other’s again they kissed in a wary exploring. Her lips were soft and warm, her mouth sweet. The fact that he didn’t like her skittered away like a scared rabbit and he had all he could do not to haul her against him and kiss her the way he really wanted to.
When the joining had nowhere to go but to his own damnation, he lifted his mouth from hers and looked into her eyes. “Jesus, there’s just something about you,” he said thickly. She looked back at him, their faces only inches apart. “So you’re not a photographer and you’re not a political animal,” he said hoarsely. “Then what are you?”
Her breath touched his lips. Her mysterious eyes continued to look into his. “Are you sure you can’t stay a little while?”
That question he didn’t need to hear. Temptation was already threatening to drag him into a deep well. “I can’t,” he choked out, grabbing onto his wits.
“Is it—is it because you’re with someone?”
“I am. Yes, ma’am. I mean, you’re a beautiful woman. Any man would—Look, my conscience would hurt if…”
