tilted my head back and studied my features. “Oh, well, you never were a beauty,” she said philosophically. She patted my cheek. “Like I’ve missed our good times together, man. Why didn’t you get in touch after you broke out?”
“Because I knew you’d be having visitors.”
“A likely story!” she snorted. “I’ll bet you had a blonde stashed away somewhere.” She smiled at me.
I smiled back. No one knew better than Hazel that I didn’t have a blonde stashed away somewhere. Women have always been a sometime thing with me. Sometimes I make it with them, sometimes I don’t. With a metabolism like that, a man stops pushing.
When I met Hazel in Florida, I was trying to run down a crooked deputy sheriff named Blaze Franklin, who had killed my partner while trying to make him divulge the hiding place of a sack loaded with cash from a bank job in Phoenix. Hazel was running the Dixie Pig in the neighborhood. She did great things with food and she served honest drinks. We hit it off from the start, but it was she who was the sexual aggressor. Even after I stumbled at the first hurdle, she didn’t quit the team. Then we got the thing in gear, and our relationship became the best I’d ever had.
It didn’t last long. I got Franklin, but during the process I was pan-fried and charcoal-grilled when my getaway car burst into flames from a police bullet in the gas tank. My face took the worst of it. In the prison hospital I had to play vegetable until I found a clever young Pakistani plastic surgeon on the staff who made me a new face. For a price.
I was in drydock for two years. I never let Hazel come to see me. She’d had no part of my action, but I was afraid her outspokenness would get her in trouble. She’d known I wasn’t a hundred cents on the dollar as far as law and order was concerned, but she hadn’t cared. When she finally realized that I wasn’t going to let her get through to me, she packed it in. She sold the Dixie Pig and went back to her homeplace, the ranch near Ely.
It was six months after I broke out of the prison hospital before I finished paying for the face job. It was another six months before the heat died down from the way in which I acquired the cash to pay for it. I held a legitimate job for a while to stay off the skyline, then drifted to the West Coast. A few days ago I’d started thinking about Hazel again. It didn’t take too much thought to make me feel that the time was ripe to contact her again and find out if I’d forfeited the ball game.
Hazel pushed me into a chair and started bustling around the kitchen. She paused in the act of opening the refrigerator door — she had an eight-foot walk-in refrigerator like a butcher shop — to take another look at me. “I’m still having trouble matching up that familiar voice with a strange face,” she said. She went inside with a platter and came out in a moment with two steaks which overhung it. “But I have a feeling the face will grow on me,” she continued. “Like tonight. D’you mind eating early? I have plans for the balance of the evening.”
“Plans?”
“Plans.” Her smile on a man would have been called a leer. “Now you just—”
The kitchen door opened and a man’s figure loomed in it. I was halfway out of my chair when Hazel spoke again hurriedly. “Hi, Pa. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Earl Drake. Earl, this is my father, Gunnar Rasmussen.”
I straightened up and held out my hand. The man in the kitchen doorway had stopped at the sight of a stranger, but he shambled into the room for a handshake. He was tall but stooped. Snow-white hair surmounted a head that could have graced a Roman coin if Roman coins had featured several-times-broken noses. The old man was dressed in a plaid work shirt, bib overalls, and gum boots. The pressure his hand applied to mine belied his age. “Pleased t’ meet a friend of Hazel’s,” he rumbled, and turned to her. “I’m goin’ out t’ the feed shed and bring in some hay on the stone sledge.”
“Don’t be late,” she cautioned. “I don’t want you that far away from the house after dark.”
The old man grunted, threw me a half-wave and a smile that indicated his opinion of feminine solicitude, and went out. “You never mentioned a father,” I said.
“Did you think I sprang full-blown from the back of a bucking bronco? Actually, Gunnar was my mother’s second husband, but I’ve always called him Pa. He refuses to live in the house since Ma died. He fixed himself up a place in the barn so he can be close to the horses he raises.”
“He looks like a rugged old party.”
“He is. Or was. Even a few years ago nobody this end of the state wanted to take him on physically.” Hazel shook her head reminiscently. “The trouble is that he refuses to act his age now. He still thinks in those terms.”
“What kind of horses does he breed?”
“Not the kind you have in mind,” she said, smiling. Hazel and I shared a common background and interest in thoroughbred race horses. “These are draft horses. Blue ribbon stock. Percherons that weigh over two thousand pounds apiece. It’s a hobby with Pa. He shows them at the county fairs.”
“This is his house?”
“It was. Plus the half-section here that I was raised on. When Ma died, Gunnar deeded it all to me. Then when Charlie Andrews had his heart attack in the middle of his best winning streak ever, I took that cash and bought up all the adjoining acreage I could get. Pa is the self-appointed overseer. I keep telling him to relax, because the spread covers eighteen thousand acres now.”
I whistled. “What can you do with that kind of land?”
“Lease it for grazing, mostly. And some of the onetime wheat acreage is in the soil bank. The land itself keeps increasing in value all the time. I get offers to sell every month, but my business manager says the land is worth more than the cash.”
During the conversation Hazel had been moving swiftly about the kitchen. A tablecloth appeared upon the formica tabletop, then silverware. The steaks had been turned and home fries were sizzling in a skillet. Hazel motioned to me. “Put your feet under the table.”
“Why’d you tell the old boy you didn’t want him too far away from the house after dark?” I asked as I approached the table.
“We’ve had trouble here.” Hazel deftly forked the sputtering steaks onto platters and heaped up mounds of browned potatoes beside them. “Cities don’t have a monopoly on wild, violent kids. A couple of months ago Pa heard a horse screaming during the night. He rushed out of the barn and found a bunch of kids laughing at one of the mares who was down inside the paddock fence. They’d broken her leg in five places with an iron bar. Sheer malicious savagery.”
The aroma of good beef tantalized my nostrils as I sat down. “Pa almost caught them at it,” Hazel continued, sitting down across from me. “He did get close enough to recognize a couple of them, and he turned their names in to the sheriff. That’s when the trouble really started. Harassment. Phone calls all hours of the night threatening Pa with the same sort of thing that happened to the mare if he didn’t call off the sheriff. That just got Pa more riled. These damned kids are vicious enough, though, that I don’t want him out on the spread by himself after dark.”
Conversation lapsed while we did justice to the steaks. Over coffee and cigarettes afterward I returned to the same subject. “What kind of kids can break an animal’s leg in five places with an iron bar?”
“At least a few we have around here. Not many, but a few. God knows what they’ll graduate to from that.”
I hate cruelty to animals. A man can look after himself, up to a point, anyway, but an animal is almost helpless against deliberate sadism. “I’d like to catch them at it once.”
“So would Pa.” Hazel rose from the table. “Have another cigarette while I rinse off the dishes.”
She refilled my coffee cup while I lit up again. I leaned back in my chair and watched her rubber-gloved assault upon the dirty dishes. The only sounds in the ranch kitchen were the swish of sudsy water and the muffled clink and clatter of china and cutlery. I noticed that it was dark outside.
I watched Hazel putting the dishes away. She was a big woman, but she had the quick, lithe movements of a girl. It wasn’t at all hard to recall the good times we’d shared in her Florida cabin. We’d struck sexual sparks from each other in that isolated oasis. It had never been so good for me, and I had hated to see it end.
Not that Hazel would have let it even after I nearly burned to death, but I couldn’t let her get involved with the part of my life that she certainly suspected but about which she knew nothing factual. And it was so long before I was sure I was going to make it again as a human being that there was all the more reason for not involving her.
Hazel stripped off her rubber gloves finally and came over to my chair. She didn’t say anything. She took my
