“I gotta have this baby in a big hospital,” she told him. “I don’t want to take any chances with this one.”
He took her to the city. She never left. Within a few months she began stocking the feed-and-tack store using the money from the sale of their cattle. He went back to his father’s ranch east of Roswell. He came into the city on weekends, driving the three hours after five days on the back of a horse, fifteen hours a day.
He’d pull in late Friday night and grab his big wife. He never questioned her decision to build the store, never questioned that the money she needed to keep it going would have to come from breaking his back on his dad’s place. He would do that for Joan McBain.
Bob Junior, Ronnie, Sara, and Phillip grew up in the sand of the north valley and the dust of the feed store. As their childhood passed, Bobby McBain grew old. The muscle began to turn to fat, two hundred and forty pounds on his six foot two inches. At fifty, he was half-owner, with his brother Joseph, of his father’s ranch and half-owner with Joan of the feed store in Albuquerque. He still held on to the ranch up north. The dugout rotted back into the hillside.
For the last five years of his life he had a town woman in Roswell. She was good to talk to, to share a drink with and a home-cooked meal. She didn’t matter, though, not the way Joan did. He made that drive over to Albuquerque almost every weekend and now stretched those weekends out to three days, sometimes four.
Right up to the day he died, Joan McBain could still make him moan with those big, firm breasts and hard thighs.
“Joan McBain,” he would say, “you are one gorgeous little heifer.”
He did warn her about those quarter horses with their big muscles and too short legs.
“Smartest damn horse ever was,” he’d say. “But you never gonna make the money on them those Arab people do.”
“I wouldn’t have none of those pin-headed jackasses on my land,” she’d say.
“Talking horses or people?” he’d ask and they would laugh.
He heard the figures, people spending thirty or forty thousand on one of those Arabians, even more. Those stories would bring roars of laughter over beers in a Roswell bar or a confused, frustrated bout of head shaking. Shit, forty thousand for a horse that wasn’t winning no races. Shit. And now they were hearing stories of Arabs selling for a hundred thousand and more. The world had definitely gone bug nuts.
Bobby McBain never had a chance that night he left that bar in Roswell. He was pulling that extra fifty pounds and riding the land or the truck twelve hours a day, finishing off with a two-hour ride on a barstool. He was dead by the time he hit the frozen ground of the parking lot. His last thoughts before the red-hot pain were about how cold the night was. It could get awful cold in Roswell, New Mexico.
“Hell, there ain’t no money to be made in raising and training these horses,” he told Joan McBain. “Not big money.”
“No money in feed stores either,” she reminded him with a smile of how he felt all those years ago when she told him her idea for a business.
“You watch,” she said of both the store and the horses.
He did and then he hit the frozen ground of the bar parking lot.
His half of the family ranch near Roswell went to her. Bob Junior joined his uncle Joseph in working the ranch. Big, like his father, muscled, able to work all day and part of the night, Bob Junior made those same weekend trips his father had, back to Joan. She would find him late on a Friday night sitting in her kitchen, nodding over a cup of coffee.
He was the quiet one. Sara was the runt. That’s what the boys called her. Like Joan, she wanted the city life. She loved her job in the clean, bright office at the museum.
Phillip didn’t have the height or the power of his father. What he did have that country friendliness. He loved people right down to bear hugs.
Joan McBain loved them all but she knew she favored Ronnie. He took over the feed store and left her free for her horses. He liked the store, the customers and the salesmen. He worked hard but made sure get home home for dinner. Every few months he would take off and head to the ranch up north.
“Bobby used to go up there every so often,” she told Ellen. “We leased the land to one of the neighbors but he kept his eyes on things. That ranch is where he got his feet on the ground, proved he could make it through those winters. Good Lord, it was miserable but we made it and it proved something to both of us. It proved to me I wanted a business.” She laughed.
“It wasn’t all bad,” she admitted, her voice softened with the memory of the skinny bed and the long cold nights when lovemaking was the only way to pass the time.
“Ronnie’s a lot like him, you know,” she said, and used her scarlet nails to pluck up another cigarette.
*
He was tall, like his father, ruggedly handsome but lean, not thick with muscle. He walked with a slow, ambling gait. He wore cowboy boots, jeans, Western shirts. They were working clothes, not shiny, new and fake like the ones Ellen saw on shop owners in Old Town.
Only a few years away from New York, they wore cowboy boots with too high heels and iron-pressed Sergio jeans. They held on to their carefully groomed beards and their neatly brushed hair. Ellen would snort whenever she came across one.
“I love it here,” was a line they would include in the first four sentences they spoke to anyone
