sections nearly were surrounded by upscale developments, but the stubborn and childless old cowboy was dickering with the Blue Creek Preservation Society, of which Betty Porterfield was president and probably the major financial angel, to put the land into a conservancy, but only if they could come up with a deal to keep it a working ranch. But nobody could come up with the deal he wanted, and it seemed that Tom Ben Wallingford was going to dicker until he died, and he seemed to think he was going to live forever.
The Overlord Land and Cattle Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Overlord Minerals, Inc., owned most of the land around the ranch – hell, most of Gatlin County – and the CEO, Hayden Lomax, insisted the old man had signed an option to sell the ranch, which Tom Ben Wallingford had denied completely. The whole thing had been simmering toward court for a couple of years before I came to stay in the Hill Country.
When Betty Porterfield asked me to move into her ranch house, I told myself that I had buried my Montana past and intended to finish out my life in the Hill Country. Betty and I had met over a gunshot dog and fallen in love over stories of loss and gunfire. And I loved Betty's ranch, a section of Hill Country heartland, and the crippled animals Betty brought home from the emergency veterinarian clinic where she worked nights, loved the bright glow of the plank floor and the homemade cedar furniture, the wood cookstove and the hissing Coleman lanterns, the reassuring scratch and peep of the chickens in the yard dust, the yawns of sleeping cats, throwing the tennis ball for the three-legged Lab, Sheba, until my arm hurt, watching the sweep of weather across the wide Texas sky as I sat on the front porch pointlessly whittling, turning cedar posts into cookstove shavings.
Until it went bad, I'd never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I'd seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal's eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty's face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she'd fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.
And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn't understand, but extremely important nonetheless. 'Texans are proud people,' her Travis Lee explained to me, 'and Betty is a Texan.' As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather's land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren't home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I'd be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty's ranch was work.
Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She'd torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.
On other afternoons I'd gather up one of Betty's saddle horses, then drift easily for a couple of hours over to Tom Ben's place, where we'd sit on the veranda sipping iced tea and watching the sun soften the cedar breaks as it settled over the Hill Country while he shucked dried corn and doled it out cob by cob to the small herd of Spanish goats he kept for the occasional barbecue. During the Korean War Tom Ben had been a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Marine reserves who had been called to active duty when I was a sixteen-year-old Army private on falsified enlistment papers, and on those occasional afternoons we sometimes touched on those times, talking without talking too much. But he never talked about WW II, except to wonder about what might have happened if we had to invade Japan. And about Korea, Tom Ben mostly complained about the cold and bitched about his feet. Never married, he was as fond of his niece as if she were his child, and he extended that fondness to me. His place was a home place in a way Betty's never quite managed, but I didn't go over there often enough.
At Betty's place I read all the books I'd always meant to read, watched endless hours of movies on the battery-run portable television with a built-in VCR, which Betty allowed me to keep in the old smokehouse. She wouldn't watch them with me but sometimes she'd come in to lean on my back, briefly, her nose snuffling out the old smoke and salt smells. Then she'd leave me to the present and drift back to the nineteenth-century British novels she was addicted to.
Also, for the first time in my life, I had long stretches of solitude with which to consider my life, trying to connect everything from my father's lovesick suicide to my mother's aggressive lie that somehow forced me to endure three months of muddy Korean hell before a broken collarbone got me back to the States in time to hear about her drunken suicide drying out at a fat farm down in Arizona. I considered it all: the failed marriages, the drunk years, the boring dry years – and it only added up to anything when I was in the arms of this sad, redheaded woman.
But I couldn't make her happy. No matter how hard I studied. Hell, I knew better. A man can make a happy woman sad but he can't finally make a sad woman happy. Then I studied her sadness until the burden of that became too much for either of us to carry.
And the sorry truth was that I couldn't study Texas hard enough to make it home. It remained a foreign country, an undiscovered dimension, too large a place to be one place, a country held together by a semi-mystical history and a semi-hysterical pride. The more it became urbanized, the more it insisted on being country. The politics seemed like a cruel trick played by the rich on the poor. When I read copies of letters sent back home from the first settlers, the lies leapt off the page like billboards advertising hell: no hot weather, no mosquitoes, free land. Like every other place I had been, it was all about money. No more, no less. And even with money, I was still an outsider, more at home with whores, small-time drug dealers, musicians, and winos. And too old to change. It was as if I was spending a thousand dollars a month for a combination of graduate school, therapy, and serious frustration. But I tried and tried until I wore out my try, until it ached like a bad tooth.
Oddly enough, it was her other uncle who brought my unease to my attention first. Travis Lee drove up to the ranch house one silken fall morning as I sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, an unread novel in my lap, an unwhittled stick at my feet, the sun warm on my face, and Betty asleep in the house.
'What's happening, cowboy?' Travis Lee wanted to know as he rolled down the passenger's window of the huge pickup. 'What the hell aren't you reading?'
'Something I always meant to read.
'Ends badly, I hear,' Travis Lee said as he kicked open the passenger door. 'Let's go down to the creek and have a beer.'
He drove silently down the pasture to the tiny creek and the spring box where I kept a case of Coors cans cooling among the crawdads and mint leaves, and silently drank a beer before Travis Lee spoke.
'Mind if I piss in your creek?' he said as he unbuttoned his jeans. Except in the courtroom, Travis Lee wore Levi's, cowboy boots, western shirts, and expensive leather vests, a wide-brimmed Stetson, plus a huge gold belt buckle decorated with what looked like a snake's head with ruby eyes.
'Ain't my creek,' I said.
'Ain't mine either, anymore,' Travis Lee said. I raised an eyebrow. 'Blue Creek doesn't look like much here,' the old man said, his large hands lifting his hat and rumpling his thick thatch of white hair, as if it could be any more rumpled, 'and over there where it joins the branch that crosses my brother's ranch, it doesn't look like too much either, but by the time it drops off the escarpment into Blue Hole, it's the perfect Hill Country creek.' I didn't think I was supposed to say anything, yet, so I didn't, just pulled two more beers out of the cold spring water. 'But I guess you knew that. Betty says you've become something of a Texas expert.'
'Self-defense,' I admitted.
'Hey, I've been to Montana,' Travis Lee said. 'You people up there can go round and round about being land- proud, too.'
'Right, but there ain't so many of us on the dance floor.'
'I always suspected that too much solitude might make a man a bit cranky,' Travis Lee said.
'I like to see the sunset without too many people in the way,' I said. 'This is nice out here, but Austin is just another city – same faces, different scenery – except for the food and the music, it could be anywhere. Besides, I was born cranky.'
