“Yeah,” they would drawl, chewing a bit on the inside of their lower lip as though playing with a wad of Skoal, “been here, oh, ‘bout five years now.”
“Almost a native,” you were expected to gush, and most visitors to their shops did.
On Ronnie the boots and the Western-cut shirts with the snapped-to-the-cuff buttons and the faded jeans were honestly worn. Ellen couldn’t help herself. She was looking at Gary Cooper.
“I mean, we’re talking cowboy here,” she told the women in the newsroom. “We’re talking down-home, back-forty, shit-kicking cowboy.”
Since almost no one in the newsroom was native to the state or the Southwest, they were equally fascinated with Ellen’s cowboy.
This was no tie-wearing PR grinner, no Paris affair, good for a year and nothing else, no boy to be charmed by Brooklynese. This man had family and a family history and a ranch and a love of the land. And, by the end of the second month, this man had something to say.
“Ellen, I think I need to tell you something and I know it’s gonna seem a bit sudden.”
He stood with one foot resting on the bottom rail of the white fence surrounding his mother’s front two acres.
“Go ahead.”
“I never said this to anybody before, Ellen, not really, but I think I’m in love with you.”
She stared in shock and then burst into a laugh of pure happiness. She didn’t tell him this was the first time anyone, man or boy, had said that to her. What she did say was a little less honest.
“I love you too. I do. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.” She moved tight to his side.
“You don’t have to say that,” he said, putting his arms around her. “You don’t have to say anything.”
“It’s true,” she said, her arms around his waist. “It is.”
It wasn’t, not then.
31
It was the trip to the ranch up north that made her question all the decisions she had made about her life and her future. Up until that trip, she wanted to travel light. She didn’t want the problems of possessions or relationships. She wanted the freedom to leave whenever she chose.
The next move, from Albuquerque to somewhere else, was close. She figured it would happen within the next six months. Love or not, this thing with Ronnie McBain could only last until the move. That’s what she thought before the trip to the ranch.
“It’s an easy ride,” he told her. “About three hours.”
They passed though a handful of towns where the main streets were a quarter-mile long with a few houses and maybe a store or a post office. Between the towns, the land was empty, free of people and their places.
“I used to go out there,” Ronnie said, nodding to the seemingly endless expanse. “I’d camp and think about things for a week or so.”
Ellen gave the statement a small smile. The emptiness was beginning to make her nervous.
Ronnie’s twang seemed to deepen as he drove the white Ford pickup deeper into the country. He pushed his cowboy hat far back on his head.
“It sure is pretty,” he commented to himself. He reached to pat her on the thigh.
“It really is,” she agreed and wondered how it was that they passed only two cars in what must have been an hour since the last town. The few pickups they did pass earned a touch of his hat brim in greeting. They got the same pseudo-tip in return.
“Not too many people up here,” he told her. “You got to depend on your neighbors.”
My God, she thought, trying to accept the strangeness of this day and this land, this really is the West. That is what the West is all about. Those New York morons with their clipped beards and their fat behinds in new blue jeans and look what I have, she told herself, look what I can learn.
“It is beautiful,” she stated firmly, wanting to believe it.
“Over that range is Pedernal,” he told her with a nod to the east. “It’s a flat-top mountain. You see it in a lot of paintings by those artists who lived in Taos back in the Twenties and Thirties. It’s like a symbol.”
She stared out at the red line of mountains and the purple shadows beyond them.
“There’s a lake up here we can go to if you want. I’ve been going up there since I was a boy. There’s another one too, but I don’t like it. Too many people from the city. Looks like this big old pond.”
She nodded her agreement.
“There it is,” he said, pointing to a cabin on a rise. “That’s the house.”
The small cabin faced the valley that stretched to the distant red mountains. The kitchen area had a hotplate, a single shelf, and a plastic ice chest. There was a double bed with a tarnished metal headboard in the tiny bedroom. In the main room, a card table had been placed in front of the large front window. They could sit there and watch the storms as they rolled over the red mountains and into the valley of the neighboring ranch.
“Watch,” he said that night as the storms moved in.
The purple and deep black-blue clouds rolled low across the valley. Bolts of lightning, like the limbs of bare winter trees, slashed down to the earth and sliced the black sky with their thin white lines.
“Tomorrow I’ll get some horses,” he told her. “Johnny Shorter will let us have a couple. We can do some riding. We’ll take a look at the dugout. Boy, my folks had it rough.”
They stayed four days. They walked and rode the land. They met other ranchers at the bar with the massive hand-carved wood door. They searched for Indian arrowheads, cooked over a fire, listened to the transistor radio and the bible thumping out of Texas. And, they made love.
She said little those days. She didn’t know what he wanted to hear and she didn’t know how she could change herself so
