Ground Money (19 page)

“The mesa,” said Jo. “The east gate.”

“That’s right—you just said, didn’t you?” He finished pumping, and the horses sucked noisily. “That’s a hot ride. Nice day for it, though.”

It was Wager’s turn to nod. Behind James, the barn doors hung open to the shade. The building was of un-painted timber; the central portion of squared and notched logs rose about twenty feet to the peak of the sloping roof. Later additions had been framed to the sides with rough-cut boards. The only sound of life from the rambling structure was a flutter of sparrows that nested somewhere inside the gaping hayloft door. The dirt in front was unscarred by animal or tire tracks, and that was something Wager wondered about: where was the farm equipment—the tractors and haybalers, the rakes and carts, the machinery that, at the Volkers’, was lined up for use or maintenance? “Do you run many cows here?”

“Enough, it seems like. I don’t know how many for sure. Mr. Watkins wants to let the range build up some. And beef prices aren’t all that good anyway.”

“We didn’t see any cattle at all coming over,” said Jo.

“It’s a big ranch. They’re spread all over hell and gone.”

Jo pulled the horses away from the water. “How big is it?”

“God, I don’t know how many acres. It goes north along the river a long way. But most of it’s not worth spit.”

“You don’t seem to have many hands for a place that big,” said Wager.

“There’s enough,” said James. “Me and John. This time of year, we don’t need any more than that.”

Wager looked at the gaps on the barn roofing and at the ranch house with its white paint beginning to blister. “You have a cook, though.”

“Yeah—Maynerd. He ain’t much help. He ain’t much of a cook, neither. But he keeps an eye on the place when nobody’s around.”

“How long has Watkins owned the ranch?”

“I guess a couple of years. I’m not sure.”

“It belonged to McGraw before he bought it?”

“I don’t know. I only been here a little while.”

“Watkins must have a lot of money.”

“Why’s that?”

“To pay the taxes on this place—to keep it going.”

“I don’t know about that, Mr. Wager. Watkins meets his payroll. That’s all I know.”

“Are you and John going to a rodeo this weekend?” asked Jo.

“Yeah—there’s one up in Grand Junction. Four go-rounds, so we might pick up some money.”

“Is John riding well?”

“Yes ma’am, he is! Anymore, it’s just like getting ground money when he enters.”

“What’s ground money?” asked Wager

“That’s pay for working the rodeo grounds,” answered Jo. “You don’t have to win it, you just get it for doing the job—a sure thing.”

“That’s John, all right—a sure thing.”

“How about you? How are you doing?”

“I’m hanging in there; I’ll get my permit—at least John says so. He says I’m way ahead of where he was a couple years ago.” He pumped up more water for the horses; Jo let them drink lightly again.

“Maybe we can see you there,” she said. “I think Gabe’s ready to look at some city lights.”

“How long you been around here?” asked James.

“About a week.” Wager smiled. “We’re just getting to know the country.”

James nodded, a tiny frown pulling his dark eyebrows together.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to your father’s funeral,” said Wager. “I didn’t know where it was.”

“What? Oh—yeah. Well, it wasn’t nothing big. Family only, you know. And me and John was all the family he had.”

Wager nodded. “As far as I know, the sheriff doesn’t have any leads on who did it.”

“I see.”

“But your dad seemed to be worried about something just before he was killed.”

“Like what?”

“I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“I thought he might have said something to you when he came out here.”

“No, he didn’t. John’s already told you, god damn it, we didn’t talk about nothing. And what the hell are you doing poking your nose into this, anyway? It’s no damn business of yours!”

“Take it easy, James. All I’m trying to do is find out who killed your father. Wouldn’t you like us to find out?”

The youth took a deep breath, and underneath the silky black whiskers, Wager saw his mouth tighten around whatever he almost said. “Yeah. Sure I do. Even if he wasn’t much of a father.”

Wager said, “Some of the people your father worked with said he was worried. That was after he visited the ranch, and before he went home and was killed. I just wondered if he might have mentioned anything to you. That’s all.”

“He didn’t say nothing to me. I don’t know what he was worried about.”

The shrill chatter of excited sparrows filled the silence of the barnyard. The horses, pulled away from the water again, sighed and stamped against the sting of flies.

“Did your father leave a will?”

“A will? Yeah—some lawyer sent John and me a letter about that. But there wasn’t much. His truck and his place was all he had.”

“And you and your brother get that?”

“Hell, no. The hospital put a lien on it. His insurance run out after a couple of days, and the hospital put a lien on the property to cover the bills. John told the damned lawyer to sell the place and pay them off so we wouldn’t get stuck with the hospital bills.”

“So you don’t get anything.”

“Between the doctors and the lawyers, I don’t expect too damn much’ll be left. If there is, John and me want to give it to Mama. We’re doing all right—but she could use it. Hell, she earned it.” He glanced at the sun. “I better get on to work. Appreciate your coming over to talk, Mr. Wager. I sure do.”

They trailed after him toward the bunkhouse.

“I’d ask you to stay for dinner, but Cookie’s kind of funny about people dropping by. He don’t like it.”

“I noticed,” said Wager.

“Well, it’s his kitchen.”

Jo swung into the saddle. “Are you getting many rafters this year?”

“Rafters? Oh—you mean the river? Yeah, we got some. The sonsabitches camp anywhere they want on the property. Start fires, leave their crap behind.”

“I thought Watkins set up a campground for them,” said Wager.

“He did. But some of them don’t want to pay to camp and they think they got a right to go any damn where they please. We spend four or five nights a week running them off.” He looked at Wager. “Some people just don’t have the sense to stay off other people’s land.”

“Y
OU ALMOST THREATENED
him.”

“He took it that way, didn’t he?” Wager ducked under the water and came up blowing hard from the cold.

They stood waist-deep in the creek behind their cabin, the shock of the water easing into comfort, and scrubbed off the dust and sweat of the long day’s ride. On the shady side of the corral, the horses—rubbed with clean hay and fed an extra ration of oats—stood head to tail, wearily content to switch the flies off each other’s face and to enjoy the dry breeze of a long evening. On the bank, reflecting the clear green of the sunless sky, two wineglasses and a bottle rested half submerged on a ledge of water-smoothed sandstone that the stream had carved into the stony bank.

“Turn around—I’ll do your back.” Jo squirted a palm full of biodegradable soap from a plastic bottle and scrubbed at Wager’s tender muscles. He had expected his legs and bottom to be sore after the day’s ride, but there didn’t seem to be any reason why his back and neck should ache, too.

“OK—my turn.”

He dipped under the current again, a wave of noisy bubbles over his head, and popped up. Jo handed him the bottle, and he massaged the thin foam across the smoothness of her back. Beneath his dark hands her shoulders looked pale and fragile, and the way she arced against his fingers’ pressure made her flesh, despite her toughness, seem vulnerable to some pending but unknown threat. It was a note of vague sadness that seemed to drain some of the remaining light from the grass and earth that surrounded them, and to leave her pale form even more isolated against the coming darkness. Wager’s hand slid down the wet softness of her body, and he rested against her as if to keep her anchored in the current that pulled ceaselessly at them both. He felt himself between the taut swell of her buttocks, and despite the cold water, his own flesh stirred. She, too, felt his throb and pressed back against him; then he reached to feel the flat suppleness of her stomach and the soft rise below that and finally the tangle of warmth that opened to him as she slowly leaned forward against the stony bank and reached to guide him gently into her.

Their sighs were no louder than the murmur of the creek, and overhead, the rustling, liquid sounds of the willows echoed their slow rhythm and rose in the wind and stilled into a crystalline moment that stretched like a high, tense, inaudible note; then they rustled again as the wind stirred to become alive, and the creek—its sound louder under the cooling sky—once more tugged at their flesh.

Their eyes said what neither would speak; silently, they gathered the glasses and bottle, the towels and sandals and soap, and picked their way over the stubbled trail to the cabin.

“I’m cold now.” Her flesh drew into a shudder.

“Let’s get warm again.”

“Let’s.”

Later she murmured, “James didn’t have any marks—you know, from up at Leadville.”

Wager stretched against the hard pad of mattress and pulled her closer beneath the thin blanket. Above, the peaked ceiling flickered with shadows from the fireplace, where a piñon log flared its hot fragrance into the room. It was appropriate, Wager thought, to have the curiously mixed and deep moment—a moment of love and fear and union that had given him a glimpse into a new area of himself—bracketed by the questions and suspicions of police work. But this time he wasn’t the one who brought it up. He smiled wryly. This time he did not try to bury whatever he had discovered, to hide it in the cushioning routine of his work. Yet it happened—Jo’s comment hung in the air like a summons. And it unmoored that moment and nudged it into the flow of time and away from him toward memory. Its loss left him holding more tightly to her slender form.

“Gabe? What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Everything’s perfect.” Was perfect. “He’s hiding something—he knows what Tom was worried about, but he doesn’t want me to know.”

“And you think it has something to do with the ranch?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.” But if pushed, he’d admit it was more feeling than sense, a feeling made stronger after seeing the place.

“There didn’t seem to be anything wrong going on there. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of anything at all going on.”

That was true. Wager guessed that none of the buildings had had any maintenance since Watkins bought the place. Why would a man give that much money to buy a ranch, spend more money on it for a couple of years, and let it begin to warp and rot in the sun? And pay three or four men to sit around and watch it happen? “Not even ranching. That’s one of the things that bothers me.”

Jo sat up and pulled the blanket to her chest and emptied the bottle into their glasses. “So you want to frighten him into doing something?”

“Into saying something. If he was scared about his own father, he might be scared about me.”

“I don’t like that.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Suppose they try something? You’ve already said they might have killed their own father. And there was that man up in Leadville.”

Wager shook his head. “They won’t. It would be like a confession. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything better to do.”

Jo wasn’t satisfied, but she only asked, “What next?”

“Police work, I guess.”

Rusty had a series of topographical maps carefully taped together and pinned across the wall in one of the empty bedrooms that he used as an office. He and Wager, drinks in hand, stood in front of it, and Rusty traced the red pencil lines that sectioned off his ranch from those surrounding it. The aroma of slowly roasting beef carried through the house from the firepit outside, and from the living room, Wager could hear Jo and Dee talking. They had been at the ranch for one week, and the Volkers used that as an excuse for a party—“We don’t have too many reasons, so we might as well make the most of what we got, Gabe”—and besides, Dee had added, she’d gone long enough without another woman to talk to, so you two come on up this evening and we’ll have us a barbecue.

Earlier in the week, Joaquin and Henry cut out a steer and butchered it. Now they stood, awkwardly trying to be at home in the boss’s office, clutching their cans of beer and glancing occasionally out the window at the bed of coals and the roasting meat.

“The T Bar M goes all the way up to here?” Wager’s finger touched a dotted line that crossed the swirl of contour lines marking high ground along each side of the river.

“I believe so. Henry, you used to work for McGraw—is that his north boundary?”

The bandy-legged man squinted at the map. His bony skull pressed against the thin flesh of a face baked the color of a paper bag. Under his beaked red nose, he jiggled his upper plate with his tongue. “Naw, that’s the power line. Here’s the ranch boundary over this way—it goes along Gypsum Ridge down to the river. East, let’s see—I should know where, I rode the sonabitch enough times … here, here’s Angel Butte, and it cuts southeast from there.”

Wager studied the USGS map with its washes of green ink to indicate forested areas. Most of that color was on the right side of the map, and the section that held the T Bar M was predominantly the pale tan of open range. Here and there were the dotted lines of unimproved roads and a crossed pick and shovel indicating old mines or quarries. “The highway doesn’t follow the river all the way through the ranch?”

“No—the terrain’s too rough,” Rusty said. “Cost a fortune to cut a roadbed through those cliffs. There’s some jeep trails here and there leading down to the water, but mostly the cliffs come right to the high-water mark. Only way through that section’s by boat.”

Henry’s teeth clicked. “Sometimes that ain’t no way, either.”

The writhing blue line of the river swung up and then angled more directly west as it crossed into Utah toward the upper Colorado. The dark brown contour lines, marking forty-foot elevations, bunched tightly all along the riverbed, darkening most at the outer bend of each twist where the stream had carved the rock into sheer faces. Scattered along both sides of the cut, the alleys of feeder streams spread the contour lines out in long Vs that indicated sloping bottomland or meadows. “Do either of you know the Sanchez brothers? They work over there now.”