Maurey was more than unhappy over Hank going underground with Lydia.
“We’re talking last straw,” she said.
I stood there, hands at my sides, wondering how I could save her. These crises are the times I’m supposed to take command.
Anger flashed in her eyes. “Who’s going to run the ranch?”
“It could be worse. I’ve lost my mother. Temporarily anyway.”
“I need Hank a lot more than you need a mother.”
That was true. At my age, a mother is more symbolic than nurturing, not that mine ever was nurturing. “I can help with the ranch.”
Maurey made a nasal sound indicating minor disgust. “Sam, this is a horse ranch; you’re afraid of horses.”
I hate it when people say that. “The ranch isn’t only a horse ranch. I can fix fence, and I’ve always wanted to learn irrigation. Moving water where it’s needed seems like a satisfying way to spend your time.”
Maurey sat in her stuffed rocking chair and stared at a spot in the air several feet in front of and slightly below her face. She said, “I have to call my sponsor.”
“Your sponsor?”
“Go find Pud. He needs your help in the hay shed.”
“Are you turning to God?” I asked.
“I’m turning to the telephone. You go help Pud and don’t come back for a couple of hours.”
Here’s my problem with Pud: Today, he seems nice enough and Maurey loves him and she’s past that stage women go through where they fall in love with creeps, so he must be okay, but way back when Pud was seven or eight his mother told him to drown a litter of kittens. As an alternative to drowning, Pud decided to let his God-ugly dog kill them. Maurey and I came upon the gory scene, there was a fight, the dog bit me, I bit the dog, and in the end we saved one kitten. That kitten was Alice, my closest pal for the next eighteen years.
Okay. Pud had excuses. He was only a child and his family was a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and back then everyone thought Pud was retarded so they treated him cruelly. I understand the excuses; but the fact is I can’t forget he once fed kittens to a dog. That was the same winter Lydia told me the rape story. People who can’t forget lead fetid lives.
I found Pud in the barn, grooming the stud.
“Molly’s in the hay,” Pud said. “We fed her three Marches ago when the snow was nose deep and the elk were starving, and now she thinks we owe her lunch all winter.”
“She’s a welfare chiseler elk,” I said.
“There’s a lesson to be learned, I guess.”
As Pud and I walked in silence up the sled track to the shed, it dawned on me for the hundredth time that I owed it to Maurey to be friends with him. Or, at least, friendly. They’d been together six years and Pud and I had yet to carry on a conversation between just the two of us.
I wasn’t certain where to begin. “Pud,” I said, “how’d you come to get into the satellite dish repair business?”
He was as surprised to hear me ask as I was to be asking. He kind of slid the corners of his eyes at me to see if I was putting him on. “Maurey and I were up the Ramshorn one July, delivering horses to the Bar Double R, and they had a dish. I didn’t even know what it was.”
“And that’s how you decided on a career?”
“I decided on a career when I saw eight full-grown cowboys hanging on every word of
“So, you look at your job as servicing junkies?”
“Heck, you should see the panic when a bandpass filter goes down. I charge seventy an hour, including travel time, which can be four or five hours back in the mountains.”
This was a bigger scam than golf carts.
“I could get two hundred if I wanted,” Pud said, “but that would be gouging.” He slid his eyes over at me again. “I’m no gouger.”
“I believe you.”
The hay shed wasn’t a shed in the North Carolina sense of the word. It was actually a large roof, larger than the roof on most houses, held up by telephone pole-looking logs about twenty feet high. The summer’s hay crop—or in drought years like this one, hay bought from Idaho farmers—was stacked in bales under the roof to keep dry, and a twelve-foot double-posted mesh fence surrounded the hay to keep out horses, porcupines, deer, moose, and elk, and anything else with a taste for grass.
The system worked fairly well except when someone forgot to close the gate properly, which is what happened the day Pete died. An elk—Molly—had gone through the fence and was eating her way around the stack, costing the ranch money it didn’t have to spare.
Pud stationed me just inside the open gate, which wasn’t any more a real gate than the shed was a real shed. It was a section of fence held in by push screws. Each side of the enclosure had a removable section so Hank could take bales from anywhere without having a long haul.
“Stand here and when she comes your way, turn her out the open hole,” Pud said.
“Turn her?”
“Only don’t get under her feet. Molly’s stomped three cow-dogs to death in her career.”
“How do I turn her without getting under her feet?”
“Wave your arms and holler.”
“She’s bigger than me.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
Pud walked off counterclockwise around the hay bales. From the northwest corner, Molly raised her head and chewed a mouthful of hay. She regarded me disdainfully—with good reason. She was wild, strong, and noble. I wasn’t. That animal knew I wasn’t bigger than her. She wasn’t stupid.
I looked across the white pasture to the river and wondered idly if I was fixing to get killed. The thought didn’t disturb me as much as I would have expected. Mostly, I considered the uniqueness in a modern society of being killed by a wild animal. I always wanted to go out in a unique way. I also thought about how lousy Shannon would feel. She would wonder if her desertion last night caused me to flaunt risks.
“Scat! Move it!” Pud’s voice came from around the corner of the stack.
Molly ignored him. Six-hundred-pound animals don’t respond to
A firecracker exploded at Molly’s feet.
Pud appeared on the far side of the elk. “Black Cats aren’t motivational enough,” he said.
By leaning toward the fence, I could see him working something out of his coat pocket. Pud is wiry and no taller than me. I’d always thought Maurey didn’t love me in the romantic way because I wasn’t tall, so it came as a shock when she took a boyfriend my size.
“Pud,” I said, “when we were kids, everyone thought you were retarded. Why was that?”
He stopped fiddling with whatever he’d been fiddling with and looked at me. “I’m dyslexic.”
His eyes have always been so soft and open, not angry like Dothan’s, that I used to suspect something other than a demented home life made him different.
He went on. “I couldn’t learn to read. My family and everyone treated me like a retard, so I believed them.”
“I remember how mean the kids were to you at school.”
“Maurey had me tested. All those years I thought I was stupider than everyone else, and then I found out I wasn’t.”
“Must have had an amazing effect on your self-image.”
