Ground Money (18 page)

A few carefully tended trees, fenced with chicken wire against the horses’ teeth, were planted to bring shade for the next generation of Volkers, but for now the sun baked the sandy corral and horse droppings into a rich odor that nonetheless smelled clean. Sheltered against a wind-pocked ledge, two mobile homes rested on cinder blocks. One was empty; the other was shared by the two ranch hands: Henry with his silver hair and whiskey-red nose, and young Joaquin, who smiled whitely and spoke little English.

“Dee said we can use the old corral down near the cabin. Rusty’s sending a couple bales of hay down tonight,” Jo said. “That way we won’t have to walk so far for the horses in the mornings.”

Wager eyed one of the stubby brown animals, which cocked its ears at him. “I don’t mind walking.”

“Come on—I’ll show you how to saddle one.”

Jo and the horses liked each other, but Wager couldn’t say the same for himself. It was, she said, because he wasn’t familiar with the equipment and the animals—he was uneasy, and so they were. But down at the old corral and away from the amused glances of the hired hands, Wager learned to curry and wipe, to talk gently while he worked around the animals—“They like that”—to search the saddle blanket for burrs before lifting it over the horse’s back, to free the blanket of any wrinkles that might chafe. He still had some trouble putting the bit into his horse’s mouth in the mornings when the gelding was feisty and tossed his head, but Jo showed him how to run his thumb back along the animal’s gum, and the mouth opened obediently.

“Don’t get your thumb between his teeth.”

“I’m not about to!”

Even on the first day’s ride, a few hours out and back, Wager found himself easing into trust with the animal, and—with good advice from Jo—he learned how to adjust the rhythm of his body to that of the horse. At least on a walk or a gallop. With a trot, he still seemed to go down when the saddle came up, and more than once the jar knocked his straw cowboy hat down over his ears. He was careful not to push the horse to a trot when Henry or Joaquin was around.

Jo, of course, rode well; the happiness that showed in her face and voice was contagious, and he heard himself yelping as he galloped after her down one of the twisting trails that plunged through the scattered piñons. As Wager learned more, he gained appreciation for how good a horsewoman she was. It was a pleasure to watch her, on a morning ride after man and beast had warmed up a bit, as she clucked her horse into an easy gallop along one of the sandy tracks. Her weight moved forward over the withers and her head and back made a smooth, even line above the horse’s bobbing torso. Wager, feeling his awkwardness in comparison, gave his horse its head and lumbered after, trying not to grab the pommel as the lunging weight between his legs swayed sharply this way and that over the rough ground in a futile effort to catch up.

“You did fine! You did great!” Jo reined to a short trot, then to a walk as the horses snorted and cooled in the wind along this ridge of high earth.

“Right,” said Wager. His horse looked back at him, and in the large, moist eye Wager saw a touch of disgust. “But I don’t think Old Paint believes you.”

She leaned close to give him a kiss, the saddles creaking beneath them. “His name’s Major. And he’s not disgusted at all. He just likes to win—like someone else I know.”

They followed the ridge out to a point of rock where the cliffs dropped away in steep, treeless shale and a tangle of fallen caprock. In the distance, a dark streak broken by foaming white patterns, the Dolores River made a tight bend against a five-hundred-foot wall of smoothly sheared sandstone. Beards of dark stain washed down the red wall where eons of seeping waters left mineral deposits, and from the top of the cliff, the piñon forest began again. In the arc of the river’s bend lay a startlingly green triangle of growth, and Wager made out a mowing machine as it chewed its way across the level point and spit out tiny dots of hay bales. There weren’t many places to grow fodder in this country; it was either too dry or too steep or both. Wager guessed that all the bottom land had been searched out and fenced off from the roving cattle so the precious winter feed could be harvested.

“Is that a town over there?” He pointed to a cluster of dark rectangles gathered around a froth of green. The thread of a highway bridge crossed the river, where the wink of sun on a windshield came like a distant, cold spark.

“That must be Rimrock. And that”—she pointed to the pale horizon downriver—“must be Utah, on the other side of that notch.”

The glimpse through the wide V of the ancient river’s course showed the mottled red and yellow of volcanic sands and the purple of distance.

“The T Bar M is upriver from Rimrock, isn’t it?”

Jo glanced at him. “You still want to go over there?”

“That’s the reason I came. One of the reasons,” he added.

“I thought you enjoyed the last few days.”

“I have. I didn’t think I would, but I have. But I came up here to do more than fish or ride horses.”

“I know that.” She studied something far down in the valley.

Wager felt as if he had clumsily broken something, and he had a pretty good idea what it was. He had felt it too in the last few days, the sloughing off of the concern with death, a slow discovery of what it meant to have hours and even days without cleaning up someone else’s mess. But Jo knew why he’d agreed to this trip. And she’d agreed to his reasons. “So what’s the matter?”

“I’d hoped that … well, Denver’s a long way off. I’d hoped that maybe for a little while you could forget you’re a cop.”

“Why?”

“So I could know some part of you that’s not connected with the police—and maybe find some part of myself, too, that’s not just cop.”

Wager questioned her use of “just”; if, for him, these last few days had been fine, they were still a vacation, an interruption of what he really did: police work. “We’re only visiting here, Jo. The real world for us is back in Denver. That’s the world we both go back to.”

Beneath them the horses shifted, wanting to move on. “I was hoping we wouldn’t bring it with us. Not so soon, anyway.”

“I guess it’s always with us.”

“I guess it is.”

She turned her horse and spurred it, startling it into a hard gallop back along the ridge. Wager’s horse followed, and he half-consciously imitated Jo, leaning forward to clear the saddle. But an ill-focused anger at himself for shattering the moment so carelessly, and at her for being so vulnerable, loomed in his mind so that his legs worked by themselves to cushion the thrust of the grunting horse. Slowly the gap between them narrowed, and Wager, spitting sand from the hooves in front, found his anger tip into a kind of savage joy at the chase, and he lifted himself higher up the horse’s shoulders. It responded with a greater lunge that suddenly matched Wager’s rhythm, and he felt the lightness and ease and exhilaration that came with the wind and sound and motion and the knowledge that he and the horse were one.

Jo glanced back, surprised to see him so close behind her, and raised up in the saddle to let her horse slow when it would. Wager drew up beside her, his own horse dropping into a ragged gait that he couldn’t figure out, and a few moments later both animals slowed to a hard-breathing walk.

“You said it before, Gabe: we should enjoy what we have.”

“It beats crying over what we don’t have.”

“And after all, it’s your vacation, too, isn’t it?” Jo mopped at his face with her bandanna. “You’ve got dirt all over. I didn’t think you’d be so close behind me.”

“I didn’t either. But I got the feel of it for a little while. It was …” He groped. “It was pretty exciting.”

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

The trail to the T Bar M was a dozen or so miles shorter than going by car, but it was still a long ride. Though they started early, by the time they wound their way down and up the steep walls of White Creek Draw, the horses were damp with late-morning sweat and swinging their tails irritably at the deerflies drawn to their matted flanks. At the top, Jo and Wager walked the animals to rest them, angling toward the tall skeleton of a windmill that marked a stock tank just beyond the low trees cresting the ridge. A tangle of cow trails converged on the large metal tub, and in the distance a scattering of white-faced Herefords looked their way with dull curiosity.

Jo watered the horses sparingly while Wager found the brake handle for the windmill. He locked it open as Rusty had asked them to. On the way back, they would close it again, to leave the tank filled with clean water and the green algae floated over the rim into the mud.

“The fence should be in another mile or so. Dee said the gate was at the foot of a cliff.”

Wager finished his sandwich and rinsed his mouth from the canteen hanging on his saddle. Then, like his horse, he gave a little grunt as he swung into the stirrup.

The landscape grew noticeably drier in the miles they traveled from the mesa that sheltered the Rocking V ranch. Since passing the fence, they had seen no cattle at all, and Jo guessed they had wandered toward the draws and gullies where grass was heavier and the cliffs offered shade. Topping a sandy ridge, they saw the river below swing in a large curve between steep walls; the wind lifted from the canyon and brought a steady, faint rush from rapids that streaked the water white.

“I bet it’s over where those trees are.” Jo pointed to a swatch of paler green in a wide valley that slid toward the river, and they angled toward it. The piñons began to thin, and now the wide, sandy spaces between the gnarled trunks were patched with sagebrush and long weedy clumps of grass. Occasional thickets of hackberry and squawbush filled the narrow cracks where water collected from the high ground above, and in the open stream beds towered the scarred trunks of cottonwoods. They nudged the horses up the spongy sand and a few minutes later paused to look down at the scattered buildings of the ranch.

The main house sat in the deep shade of a row of cottonwoods, and another tree gave shelter to a long, single-story building that must have been the bunkhouse. The barn, its roof a patchwork of different-colored wooden shingles, stood near a network of weathered corral fencing, and a scattering of small buildings sagged emptily. Near the house were parked a couple of cars and a familiar truck, and on a small rise glinted the bowl of a television dish. As they approached, a large police dog began to bark loudly and ran toward them.

Wager and Jo reined in their nervous horses as the chained dog stopped to bark a steady stream.

“I’ve never seen a dog that big!”

It looked like a small donkey, its size made larger by the hair rising stiffly along its spine. A heavyset man came onto the porch. His voice reached Wager in a distant call: “Smokey—Smokey—get over here!”

The man hooked the dog’s chain into a short leash and stood waiting as Jo and Wager clucked their horses forward. His face was a smudge of short beard, and he did not smile as they halted and said hello. Instead, he came slowly down one of the wooden steps and waited silently, his shadow a small pool under his feet.

“You’re Mr. Watkins?”

“He’s not here. I’m the cook.”

“I’m Gabe Wager. We’re staying over at the Volker place. Is John or James Sanchez around?”

He took another long moment to answer. “Yeah.”

Wager kept his voice polite. “Can we talk to them?”

“Over there—the bunkhouse.” He pointed to the low building that looked like a cinder-block motel. Most of the doors were closed, but one on the end stood open to the breeze. Wager and Jo said thanks and turned toward it.

“That’s western hospitality?” Jo whispered.

“Western Transylvania, maybe.”

“Don’t say that. This place is spooky enough!”

Wager didn’t know if “spooky” was the word, but he felt the man’s eyes on their backs as they crossed the silent yard. The stillness was a contrast to the Volkers’, where someone was always busy with some chore around the outbuildings—Henry fussing with a tool, his mouth busier than his hands; Joaquin coming in from or going out to one of the ranges in a rattling pickup. Something was always going on there. But there was no sound of a hammer or whine of an electric tool; a rooster crowed from one of the smaller sheds, but the only other sound was the wind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the cook still staring after them; the German shepherd, lying in the cool sand under the porch, watched them too.

Wager dismounted and dropped his reins over a saw-horse made into a roping dummy and sporting a two-by-four head and a pair of wide cowhorns. “John? John Sanchez?” He rapped on the doorframe, and in the answering silence a curl of white paint spiraled into the sand. “James?”

“Just a minute.” The voice croaked with sleep, and they heard the rusty creak of springs. “Who is it?”

“Gabe Wager.”

A rustle of cloth and the jingle of coins or keys in a pocket being jerked over knees. “Who?”

“Wager. We talked up in Leadville at the rodeo. I was a friend of your father’s.”

James came to the door still tucking his shirttail into the front of his jeans. He was barefoot and his black hair tangled stiffly at the back of his head. “What the hell are you doing here?” His eyes, no longer sleepy, stared at Wager. “Is something wrong? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s wrong. We’re staying over at the Volkers’ place. We wanted to come by and say hello.”

He scratched at his face beneath the soft whiskers and stared at Wager. Then he blinked and looked at Jo for the first time. “Well, that’s—ah—that’s neighborly.”

“Can we water our horses?” asked Jo.

“Oh—sure. I’ll show you. Let me get my boots. We got a trough around by the barn.” He jammed sockless feet into his boots and led them around the bunkhouse toward the large building. “You rode over? Which way’d you come from?”

Wager pointed. “That way. Through your east gate. How’s John?”

“He’s fine. He’s out riding fence today. I—ah—wasn’t feeling too good, so John let me sleep in.” The young man busied himself with the squeaking pump, and in a few seconds water splashed into the frayed wooden trough. The horses snorted thirstily and pushed closer. “Was it a long ride over? Did you come across the mesa or along the river?”