“What’s going on?” he asked one old-timer.
“Friday noontime, they haul in to reload on supplies. Lots of spread-out places here. More’n you’d imagine. The boys all git together for a bit of joshing time on Friday noons.”
“I see,” he said.
He wandered on through the thinning crowd, utterly failing to connect any of these tawny, ageless men who seemed from a different race altogether with his image of Bob Lee Swagger.
He reached at last the supply house, where some laborer was throwing sacks of feed into the back of a weathered green pickup.
Russ froze and then unfroze and just stared.
The man was tall and sweaty and had wrapped a red bandanna around his throat to soak up the sweat. He wore the faded jeans and faded denim shirt of a cowboy, but was also wearing a battered, faded red baseball cap that said
The man felt him staring and looked him hard in the eyes and yes, yes it was him: older than Russ expected, and browner, almost the color of Navajo pottery, without an extra ounce of flesh anywhere on his face. His skin was a nest of fissures and crags, taut yet ruination itself. The pewter eyes were so intense they burned like lasers. He looked not at all romantic or heroic: he looked like a hot tired sweaty man with a lot of work still to do. He looked grumpy as hell, and maybe mean too. He looked like he could whip Russ’s ass.
“What are you staring at, sonny?” he demanded.
Russ was overcome with shame. But also excitement, and he ran to him and blurted, “Mr. Swagger? Mr. Bob Lee Swagger. I came a long way to see you.”
“Well, you wasted your goddamned time,” said Swagger. “You go write your goddamned book on your own. I ain’t explaining myself to a pup like you or the best writer on earth. I hate writers. I
With that, he climbed behind the wheel of his truck and headed off.
Bob worked the horse. The horse had an eye condition, an ulcerated pupil which had infected, possibly from fly contamination. The infection had spread mysteriously and monstrously until the eye looked like an eight ball sheathed in mildew, and terrible acne had formed on the face all the way up to the ear and halfway down to the nostrils. He was a beautiful gray gelding named Billy, and the girl who owned him had done a good job building him up and bringing him along until the eye thing.
“It’s the worst disease anyone in our family has ever gotten,” said the girl’s mother. “He could
“Now, now,” Bob had told her, but mainly told the grave little girl who hadn’t said a word, “the vet’s done all he can. You got to trust the medicine and we won’t miss a night, and you got to trust us. We’ll take the best care of Billy that can be taken.”
Bob Lee Swagger, having survived nearly fifty years of a life that included various adventures in the Marine Corps (three tours in the Southeast Asian War Games, Second Place Finish) and a private life that was amazingly complex, had ended up the one way he’d never thought he’d end up: happy.
Now, who in hell would have thought such a thing?
For one thing, the dry Arizona weather had a miraculously curative power over his reconstructed left hip, where a 148-grain 7.62?54 full-metal-jacketed bullet launched at over 2,600 feet per second had torn out a hideous amount of bone and cartilage. It had taken the government a long year in a vet hospital to get the thing rewired and even then, after all that time, it had been a jury-rigged job and for a good twenty years he’d awakened each morning with the reminder that if you hunt men for a living, they by God hunt you back. The pain possibly had led to the drinking, but possibly not: he’d stayed drunk and mean for nearly a decade to bury pains that maybe had nothing to do with his hip and could not otherwise be rewired, memories of young men thrown away for so much nothing, except possibly a name on a black wall. That took time to work out and make peace with and now the blessed lack of hurt down there where he was rebuilt was extra gravy every goddamned day. But that was only part of it.
The other part of it was the wife. A woman. Julie Fenn, R.N. She’d once been a picture carried between the helmet and the helmet liner by his spotter, one of the great young men who came home from the land of bad things in a rubber bag in a wooden box. Some short circuit in the universe had decreed that Bob meet Julie many years later; when he’d seen her, he’d known: This is the one. There is no other. And by the same token, she’d known that of him, and now they were married, had a little girl named Nicki who wrote her name YKN4 backwards and scrambled, the age tossed in too, on all her drawings of horses. It was so good, so many of the things he’d thought he’d never have, because he had been exiled from the rest of the human community, because he’d done his country’s bidding with a rifle and gone out and officially killed 87 enemy soldiers, one at a time, over a long distance. He knew, of course, that he’d killed 341. Now all that was somehow forgotten.
And then the last thing, the goddamned frosting on the goddamned cake: the horses. This was the best work there was. There was something about a horse that he loved. They told no lies and if you handled them well, they responded. He never met one that was ambitious or jealous or hypocritical. They were honestly stupid creatures, strong and dumb as oxen, but with that magic component that he so loved in animals even when he’d hunted them, which he did no more: some magic would come over them and in a flash they’d go from grazing herbivores to sheer dancing beauty on the hoof. To watch them run—especially, say, under the tutelage of some small girl like the one that owned Billy or the one that was his own and would grow in time to be a horsewoman herself—to watch them run, all that muscle playing under the skin, all that dust ripping up beneath their powerful hooves, by God, that was a kind of happiness that could be found in no bottle and in no rifle and he’d looked for happiness in both places.
He worked Billy. It was called lunging; the horse is on a tether and if you work it around in circles, cantering twenty feet out on a lunge line, driving it with a lunge whip or, as now, if you’ve bonded with the horse, with voice alone.
“Come on now, Billy,” Bob crooned, and Billy’s muscles splayed and flexed as the horse rotated around Bob, though to Bob it was straight ahead of him, because he was rotating with it. The dust rose and clung to the gray’s sweaty shoulders; he’d need a good rubdown afterwards, but that was all right, because they were coming to get Billy that afternoon.
Twenty minutes. When Billy had begun to recover, Bob had started lunging him, to get the softness and soreness out of his limbs, get those muscles hard and sleek and defined again, get him back to what he’d once been. In the beginning, the animal had balked, still unsure because the ulceration had eaten into his vision and he only saw 60 percent in the bad eye, and could only go seven or eight minutes before beginning to act out; now he did twenty minutes three times a day, no problem, and was looking as if he could show again soon.
“Okay, boy,” Bob called, and began to draw in the lunge line that ran to a halter called a caveson. Slowly, he brought the horse in and at last halted him. He snapped off the line, removed the caveson and threw a halter over him. Now he’d walk the animal for another twenty minutes to cool him down; you never put a hot horse away. Then he’d wash him off. Mrs. Hastings and Suzy would pick him up at three, and it would work out just fine. Billy would be gone back to his life.
You had to do something and this was it for Bob. His marine pension still came in, his wife, Julie, still worked three days at the Navajo reservation clinic, and sometimes more if necessary, and there was just enough for everybody to have everything they needed.
“Daddy?”
Nicki was four, blond, and a tough little thing. It’s good to raise them on a ranch twenty miles from town, he thought: teach them to get up early and go feed the animals with you, form their character early to hard work and responsibility, as his had been formed, and they’ll turn out fine. He had been raised with a father lost to grotesque tragedy; nothing like that would happen to his child.
“Yes, YKN4?”
“Billy’s sweaty.”
“Yes, he is, baby girl. We got him lathered up fine. Just a good workout. Now we got to get him cooled down.”
“Are they coming to take Billy today?”
“Yes, baby girl, they are. He’s all better now. See, some scars, some vision loss, but other than that, he’s
