Jay guessed he must have been an Old West pioneer in some previous incarnation—either that, or he was more of a romantic than he liked to believe—because of his hand-built scenarios, several of his favorites were cowboy sequences.
In this one, Jay was a wrangler who was going to watch other wranglers ride bucking broncos. Yeah, sure, it was yee-haw kinda stuff, but information flows and datasets could be snorers, and anything that made them more interesting to parse was to the good.
But as he was climbing up onto the split-rail wooden fence to sit and watch, he glanced over at the weathered barn and saw Siddhartha Gautama, aka the Buddha, in a saffron robe, leaning against the faded wooden barn, smiling.
Jay laughed. Saji. She was the only one who had unrestricted access to his scenarios. Even Thorn had to knock. . . .
He climbed back down from the fence and ambled toward the thin and smiling figure. Buddha was sometimes depicted as a laughing fat man—the Hotai—but historically speaking, Siddhartha had been an ascetic at one point, barely eating enough to survive. Even after finding the Middle Way, the man who became the Realized Buddha had never given in to dietary excess. Jay knew this because Saji had taught him the rudiments of the philosophy and its history, even though he had not exactly embraced it. . . .
He strolled up to Saji in her Buddha form. “Hey, Buddy. How’s it goin’?”
“ ‘Buddy.’You make that same bad joke every time. And you’re a terrible cowboy—way too much corn pone in that accent.”
“Ouch. You got a mean streak, O holy one. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. We’re almost out of milk, and I wanted you to stop and pick some up on the way home.”
“Sure, no problem. And, uh, I’ll get the right kind, this time.”
“You better. Otherwise, it’ll be you up all night trying to calm the boy down.”
He laughed.
Buddha smiled enigmatically and then, like the Cheshire Cat, vanished, leaving only the smile, which faded shortly thereafter.
Jay shook his head, and headed back toward the corral. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be programmers. . . .
Ruth was, as Thorn’s grandfather used to say, a pistol. After she hugged Marissa, she did the same for Thorn, and long past seventy-five or not, she had strength in her grip. She leaned back and looked closely at his face. “Good bone structure,” she said. “Must be more Indian than honky in you.”
Thorn laughed. “My mother’s doing,” he said. “The white man in our family woodpile was earlier.”
Ruth laughed, a loud, raucous rumble from deep down. “He doesn’t seem like such a tight ass to me.”
Marissa grinned, real big, and Thorn shook his head. “Well, I see where Marissa gets it from.”
“Come on in, you lettin’ the heat out. Amos has gone to take Sheila for her PT; he should be back in half an hour or so.” She closed the door behind him.
The house was a lot warmer than the blustery, raw Georgia morning outside, a big woodstove installed in front of the fireplace providing a radiant heat. “I just put biscuits in the oven. Stick your stuff in the bedroom and come on back down, I’ll fix you some breakfast. You look like a man who could use a few pounds, and Lord knows you won’t gain any weight from Marissa’s cooking. I hope she warned you.”
“Yes, ma’am, she allowed as how she wasn’t much of a cook.”
“I tried to teach the child, but she was always more interested in climbing trees and beatin’ up on the boys. Go on upstairs, let me go fetch some eggs.”
Ruth hurried away.
The house was fairly large, and probably well over a hundred years old. It was a big living room, a high ceiling with wainscotting, and had a dark blue couch eight feet long facing the woodstove. There was an overstuffed chair and a couple of end tables, and a coffee table, the latter three of which looked like cherry, matte-finished and waxed or oiled rather than shiny. A matching cabinet stood in one corner, and the door was ajar enough to see a fair-sized TV screen behind it. Must be a satellite dish out here somewhere; it was a long way from town for cable.
One entire wall was nearly all taken up by bookshelves, floor to ceiling, fifteen feet wide, at least, filled to overflowing with mostly hardbacks and a few paperbacks.
The house immediately felt like a home—lived in, comfortable, full of life.
There was a hall with a room off to the left, and the kitchen straight ahead. It was clean, the painted and wall-papered walls looked fairly fresh, and the smell from the kitchen was great—biscuits baking. His own grandmother had been big on cooking breakfast, but Thorn had fallen out of the habit of eating much in the morning years ago.
As they headed up the stairs, Thorn asked, “Who is Sheila?”
“The dog. She’s got a bad hip. My grampa takes her in a couple times a week for PT.”
“The dog?”
“You didn’t have pets on the rez, Tommy?”
“Yeah, sure, but we didn’t have any
“Here’s another big gap in your education.”
They reached the top of the stairs, and Marissa led the way into a bedroom with a large window that allowed in a fair amount of light—or would if it wasn’t so gray and overcast as it was today. The bed was a double, with a brass headboard shaped like a big letter H with a second crosspiece, and there was a heavy patchwork quilt covering it. It was somewhat cooler than downstairs, and Thorn reckoned that the woodstove was the primary, if not the only, source of heat. Close the door here and it was apt to get pretty chilly on a winter’s evening.
“The little bathroom is at the end of the hall, and there’s a space heater in it—it gets cold. You can shower there, but the tub is in the big bathroom downstairs.”
“Nice.”
“This used to be my room. Fortunately, my grandparents didn’t make it into a museum after I grew up, so you don’t see the Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, and Tom Cruise posters I had up when I was fourteen.”
“Tom Cruise?”
“Even then I had a weakness for cute white boys.”
Thorn chuckled. “So, you were talking about Shelia?”
“Anybody who says, ‘It’s just a dog.’ has never really gotten to know one. My grandparents have owned—or been owned by—Sheila for ten years. She’s family. Before that, they had others: Titus, Laramie, and Winslow are the ones I remember.”
“I never had a dog as a kid,” he said. “Too many cousins in and out of our house, wasn’t enough room to keep a hamster.”
“People love their companion animals. They feed some of ’em better than a lot of people in this country eat. They take them to the vet when they get sick or hurt, give them medicine, have surgery done. Pretty much anything you can do to a person with a surgical scalpel, somebody has done to a pet—they fix torn tendons or broken bones, take out tumors, even replace bad hips. X-rays, MRIs, whatever tests you need. I knew a man once spent six hundred dollars on treatments for a budgie for a broken wing. Bird cost him thirty dollars originally.”
“Jesus.”
“So if your dog tears up his hind leg running through the field, you can get it repaired by a top surgeon who specializes in doggy orthopedics, and then you can take him to someplace like Canine Peak Performance, where a vet who does rehab will put him in a tank full of water with a treadmill in it and strengthen the muscles without putting as much weight on the injury as it would walking around your neighborhood. That’s what Sheila is
