And I really was okay. It wasn’t exactly the evening I had planned. To tell the truth, I was probably relieved. The untold expectations of my first date in four, not three, years had kind of hammered me. When I made the turn at Crossroads, the lights were off at the bar, and I was glad there was nobody there to share war stories with. It was time to go to my little cabin with its stud walls, plywood floors, and UV-unprotected logs. Henry was right. It was time I got around to a few changes.
When I got home, the red light was once again blinking on my phone machine, so I punched the button. “Hi, Pops…”
4
“You are not dying.”
“How do you know, you’ve never died.” I pushed my spine into the depression in the mile-marker post and eased my weight against its scaly green-painted surface.
“I have died many times.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Get up.”
I picked a piece of cheat grass from the red shale roadbed, and it came out in one whole stalk, roots and all. It was cold, too. The frost clung to every surface, encasing the poor little fellow like those dragonflies you see trapped in thousand-year-old amber. If I was going to keep doing this every other morning, I had to get a pair of gloves. I raised my head and looked at him as he positioned himself in front of the rising sun like some fighter pilot moving in for the kill. He nudged me with his foot. “Get up.”
I took a large swipe at his legs, but he nimbly jumped back out of the way, gravitating to the balls of his feet and rolling up on another set of wheels. The tendons and veins popped out of his naked ankles like those of some skinned cat, and I looked away, colder than when I hadn’t noticed he wasn’t wearing any socks. He came back and nudged me with the same foot as I resettled against my post. “If you don’t stop kicking me, you really are going to find out about dying.”
“This is something I did not know about you, grumpy in the mornings.” He looked into the little breaths of wind, which clattered the dried leaves that had refused to release their grip on the black cottonwoods along the Piney. Under Tiepolo skies, shrouded with banks of gray, rolled back at the lavender and cream edges like waves receding from a high shore, the sun was just starting to hit the tops of the hills in the Wolf Valley. I wouldn’t die, so I was feeling better.
“What are you smiling at?”
“Leave me alone, I’m having a moment of grace.”
He stared at me. “Well, we would not want to interrupt that.”
I tossed a piece of shale at him, missing by a good two feet. “If you can have multiple lives, I can have moments of grace.”
He grunted. “How was your moment of grace last night?”
“Not bad, as moments of grace go.” I thought for a while. “More like a moment of truth.”
He nodded. “That is good, they are harder to come by.” He winced as he stretched the tendons in his right knee; maybe he wasn’t indestructible. “So, she left the Jeep?”
“Yep.”
“You drive her home?”
“Yep.”
He stretched for a minute more, leaned against the mile-marker post I was sitting against, and sighed. “Okay…”
“Okay, what?”
“We do not have to talk about it.”
“We are talking about it.”
“No, I am talking about it, and all you are doing is saying ‘yep.’ ”
I put on my best faraway smile and looked at the glowing hills down the valley. “Yep…”
He kicked me again.
A battered black and maroon three-quarter-ton diesel with a roll feeder, signature MCKAY RANCH, was coming down the road; it slowed as it got to the bridge and rolled to a stop beside us. Clel Phillips was the head ramrod for Bill McKay and was probably wondering what the Indian was doing beside the road with the sheriff laying alongside the barrow ditch. He rolled the window down on the feed truck and rested his shoulder against the door. “Hey.”
Clel poured himself coffee from an aged Stanley Thermos and offered Henry a sip, which was gratefully declined, so he motioned toward me, and I left grace behind for a steaming cup full of drip-dry Folgers. My legs were about to kill me. “Hey.”
The coffee tasted good, and I used my other hand to pull the sopping sweatpants from between my legs. Clel filled the cup up again. “What’re you fellas up to?”
“Running.”
He looked up and back down the road. “From what?” He took the insulated cap back and took a sip. “Hey, Sheriff…” Business call. I never ceased to be charmed by the cowboy way of priming the pump. They were like cattle, constantly looking into your eyes to see if there was danger or if there needed to be. It was the best part of the cowboys’ character, the animal husbandry part. They stayed up through many nights in frozen calving sheds, running their hands over and into expectant mothers, comforting them, soliciting them. The cows’ lives depended on them, and their lives depended on the cows. It wasn’t an easy way to live, but it had its rewards. “I’m havin’ a little trouble with Jeff Tory.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“You know that stretch of bottom land between his place and McKay’s? Well, he’s been lettin’ bird hunters on his place, and they seem to be havin’ a little trouble figurin’ out where Tory’s place ends and ours begins.”
Escaped pheasant, Hungarian partridges, and chuckers were prevalent up and down the valley as they fled from the two local bird farms and from the eastern Remington Wingmasters that pursued them. We had the best bird hunting in the state, and every once in a while somebody else found out about it. I hadn’t hunted since Vietnam; somehow, it had lost its appeal. Clel was finishing up his saga by the time I got interested in his problem, “… and Bill says he’s gonna give ’em a load of rock salt for their trouble.”
“Well…” Henry was bobbing up and down, but I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. In sheriffing, shooting people with anything was bad business, and Bill McKay was just the kind of ornery cuss that would go after double-ought buck hunters with rock salt just to call it even. “Does Bill have signs up along that stretch of fence?”
This is not what Clel wanted to hear, another chore to add to his ever-growing list. “No, we ain’t got no signs. You’d think the fence would be enough.”
“Well, I guess it’s not.” The state law was fence to keep out, which meant that if you didn’t want anything on your land, you were responsible for the fences, but evidently it took stronger measures for the two-legged variety. “Why don’t you run into Shipton’s and get some of those yellow metal no hunting signs and just wire ’em to the fence?”
“Then what?”
“Then you call me.”
He mulled that one over. “Sheriff Connally woulda let us shoot ’em.”
I reached over and took his coffee away from him. “Yep, Lucian probably would have done the job himself, but we’re living in more enlightened times.” I drained his cup and handed it back with a smile. “Ain’t it grand?”
I pushed off the truck and casually thundered the entirety of my 255 pounds, shoulder first, into Henry’s chest, emptying his lungs and sending him sliding backwards into the frosty grass below. I turned to smile and wave at Clel as I cut behind his truck and ran for my life. Past the county line, another hundred yards to my driveway, and another hundred to the cabin. I would never make it. I started listening to the rhythm of my breathing as I pushed with every muscle I didn’t have. Maybe this was all I needed every morning, somebody angry to chase after me. I
